Process looks set for this weekend

by Brian Leubitz

The budget deadline is this weekend, and without the need to pull a few Republican votes, harmony seems to reign. Well, not so much real harmony, but something that passes for harmony in Sacramento when you look at the past budget fights before the majority vote budget and Prop 30 votes.

With closed-door negotiations bearing fruit, the joint budget committee is expected to meet Wednesday afternoon to nail down more details on state spending.

“We’ll get through most of it,” Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who is chairing the committee, said in an interview.(LA Times)

Everybody seems to be all happy-go-lucky on getting a deal done. But to be clear, there are a lot of tough choices to be made. K-12 funding is still too low. Court funding is getting a boost, but is probably still too low. Skinner and Steinberg are still fighting Brown’s intention to end overtime pay for homecare workers.

The bigger issue overhanging much of this is whether to include an additional $2.5 billion in projected capital gains revenue, with some sort of compromise likely.

Yes, the negotiations are more civil than in the past, but the issues are very real. Gov. Brown seems to be a bit hesitant to restore funding levels anytime soon, but there is a lot of gap to fill between how much the state needs in services and how much we are providing. The higher end of our economy has clearly recovered, but that is far from universally true across the income spectrum.