I’m back.  So the general government trailer bill passed, after a bit of drama, 27-12.  They’ve gone into a caucus in the Senate.

The Assembly is in session as well, and they just passed something or other with the bare minimum 54 votes.  I’m not sure what it was, actually.  Just walked in.

…on the flip, I’m going to put a letter from the Indiana State Senate Minority Leader, Vi Simpson, that he sent to the California Legislature about the privatization of social services like Medi-Cal, Food Stamps and CalWORKs.  They tried a version of this in Indiana.  Take a look at what Sen. Simpson has to say about it.

…by the way, this measure passed the Senate, despite Sen. Simpson of Indiana’s best efforts.

The Assembly just passed some concurrent votes, basically passing what the Senate passed… the last one was cuts to health and human services.  Scott Lay shares my puzzlement:

Odd that Dems are voting for deep cuts that Reps don’t have to vote for

Because we don’t have a functioning leadership that would make Republicans pay the price for what they’re about to do to the state.

…The tougher votes are being shifted until the end, and paramount among them are the local government takings and the offshore drilling provisions.  I think the former, which will attract bipartisan No votes, might actually be in more danger than the latter.  The Governor was adamant that he would not sign a partial budget before.  If he doesn’t get that vote on local government takings, he’d have the choice to sign a partial budget.  What will he do?

…AB9XXXX (all those X’s because this is the fourth extraordinary session of this year) is on the floor, dealing with cuts to the developmentally disabled budget.  Jared Huffman and Jim Beall just told me how terrible this bill is but they’ll vote for it.  It passed 59-11.

…AB11 is up (Resources).  Actually, this one uses stimulus money in the budget year.  65-9.

…SB13, 54-14.  That one dealt with courts and the judiciary.  It’ll close the courts one day a month starting in August.

…The Assembly has moved into caucus (at least the Republicans).  All’s quiet for the moment.

…thought I’d share this picture up in a city government building:

The OC Register has a story up about the potential bankruptcies that could result from local government raids.

Asm. Tony Mendoza, one of the many lawmakers tweeting tonight, notes that Asm Reeps are having issue with AB 12/ SB 12.  John Myers informs that one would cut money for the Williamson Act, which is particularly popular in rural areas.  The Act “enables local governments to enter into contracts with private landowners for the purpose of restricting specific parcels of land to agricultural or related open space use. In return, landowners receive property tax assessments which are much lower than normal because they are based upon farming and open space uses as opposed to full market value.”  I can see why it’s popular to those who get the reduced taxes.

UPDATE by Robert: Tony Mendoza also made this point:

Some members who have a problem voting on this bdgt, are saying the same arguments I said in Feb., when I didn’t vote & lost my Cmt Chair

In other words, Mendoza voted against the February budget deal and was punished by Speaker Bass for doing so. Now other Assemblymembers are realizing Mendoza had been right all along. Could it be that Democratic legislators are finally waking up to the reality that the system is rigged against them? That they are doing the Republicans’ work for them, destroying California only to come back 5 months later to have to do it again?!

…Scott Lay notes the insanity of community college cuts:

ABX4 1 cuts community colleges by the largest amount ($ or %) in the system’s history, at a time of huge demand.

The school where I have taught several courses, Monterey Peninsula College, has seen soaring enrollment over the last 4 years. Demand for classes is enormous. People WANT to go to school. They WANT to learn new skills, new trades. And California is about to tell them “sorry, no, sucks to be you.” This is as good an example as any of the anti-stimulative effect of this budget as anything.

And that passes 54-21.

…Another health trailer bill passes 74-2.  Transportation bill up.  Sandre Swanson, Democrat, really is the only one to consistently vote no tonight.

…The transportation bill runs aground, stuck at 53 votes.  Interesting.

…They held off on that one, and moved to a bill that would increase state tax withholding by 10%, basically an interest-free loan from workers to the state.  Should be interesting to see if it gets Republican votes… it didn’t need Republican votes, majority-vote trailer bill, 45-31, passes.

…John Myers tweets that Steinberg and Bass are discussing something on the floor.  I think we’re about to see what will happen on the more controversial issues (local govt raids and drilling).

July 22, 2009

Dear California State Leader:

We have watched with interest as California considers option to reduce state costs, particularly

a proposal to centralize and contract out eligibility determination for state benefits including the

Medi-Cal, Food Stamps and CalWORKs programs.

I wanted to share with you from a first-hand perspective how dangerous such a policy can be for

your state’s long-term fiscal health and the welfare of California’s citizens. In 2007 the State of

Indiana signed a ten-year, $1.16 billion contract with IBM Corp. and Affiliated Computer

Services Inc. (ACS) – the largest contract of its kind, both in terms of taxpayer dollars and length

of contract term. Just two years into this experiment, the cost savings expectations have been

dramatically lowered, the roll-out has been halted, error rates have increased, and our citizens

are not being properly served.  

First, cost savings are not materializing as promised. In November 2006 Indiana Governor Mitch

Daniels said that privatization would save the state $500 million over the 10 year life of the

contract. More recently in July 2009, an agency spokesman said they expect to reduce costs by

$300 million over the 10 years, but that the savings won’t begin to be realized until 2011.  

The modernization of eligibility determination for Medicaid, food stamps, and emergency

assistance has been implemented in 59 of Indiana’s 92 counties. Private call centers now

handle about one-third of the state’s 1.2 million-person caseload.

For those Indiana state legislators within the rolled out areas, the volume of complaints and

constituent requests for assistance related to the privatization have increased dramatically,

practically turning our legislative staff into caseworkers for our constituents. We anticipate that

this will only continue and most likely get worse if the remaining 33 counties are brought into the

modernized system.

As you know, the layers of state and federal statutes, regulations, and court decisions make

public benefit programs very complex. Outsourcing the intake process of these programs

undermines the value of experienced caseworks who help citizens navigate networks,

determine eligibility, and find the most effective combination of services. Indiana’s administration

released approximately 1,500 caseworkers from state employment in March 2007. This year the

Indiana General Assembly enacted a bill requiring the Division of Family Resources to maintain

offices in each county rather than consolidating the office operations into regions or districts with

the intention of ensuring that residents have state caseworkers to approach face-to-face with

questions or concerns regarding their benefits.

Finally, the increase in error rates and fault in timeliness have drawn sharp criticism from a

broad community of advocates, non-profit community organizations and private businesses who

serve our constituents and from the federal government.    

The food stamp program has drawn the most attention due to the oversight of this program by

the federal government, and the program data serves as an example of the overall impact. In a

June 23, 2008, letter the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service requested Indiana’s Family and

Social Services Administration (FSSA) to realize “measurable improvement” in food stamp

processing before the state proceeded with any additional roll-out. On the same day, FSSA

suspended the roll-out reportedly due to the need to divert attention to flooding response in the

state. The suspension remains in place today.

Statewide, Indiana failed to process 68% of food stamp applications within its own extended

goal of 60 days (the federal standard is 30 days) during the final quarter of 2008. The USDA

also reports a worsening negative error rate for food stamp delivery. A negative error rate of

12.18% was reached in FY2008 as 75,000 people out of 623,000 may have been improperly

denied food stamps. Further, Hoosier complaints received by the federal government about

problems receiving food stamps have increased dramatically from 5 in 2005 to 99 in 2008.

Our state has been left in a very difficult position.

Earlier this month, Indiana asked IBM Corp., as the contract lead, to submit a “corrective action

plan” to address more than 200 recommended changes to improve training, reduce turnover,

add 350 more employees and introduce more technology to speed up approval of applications

and reduce error rates.  

FSSA Secretary Anne Murphy has said that if IBM’s service record does not improve by

September, it’s possible the contract will be canceled. Ms. Murphy also recently said that her

agency doesn’t have a backup plan for running the system that provides benefits to 1.2 million

Indiana residents if the contract is cancelled.  

Where we now stand is with a dismantled system that underserves citizens and has cost the

state $315 million with no realized cost savings. All of this comes at a time when Hoosier

families face the highest unemployment rate in 26 years and the state is cutting every penny

available to deal with dramatically falling revenues.

I urge you and other state leaders to reject a proposal to privatize eligibility determination for

state benefits programs. The long-term costs to your state and to California’s citizens will

outweigh the promise of savings that may never be realized.

Sincerely,

Vi Simpson

Indiana State Senate Democrat Leader

District 40

The State Senate is in session right now.  You can watch at CalChannel, if you dare, or follow along with the live-tweeting at the #cabudget hashtag.

…Jeff Denham is completely grandstanding and trying to create a mailer for his Lt. Governor campaign.  He’s playing the Tough on Crime Wurlitzer by lashing out at the cut to the corrections budget.  Lying about the early release figures, too.  Chris Kelly must be getting a thrill up his leg.

UPDATES by Robert: Now Tom Harman, Republican of Huntington Beach, is parroting Denham’s claims on early release. This isn’t a budget debate, this is a GOP attack on Democrats.

…high drama on the first bill, AB 1, in the Senate. Although 4 Republicans voted Aye – Ashburn, Aanestad, Hollingsworth and Huff – 3 Dems have voted no, and they are Cedillo, Correa and Yee. DeSaulnier and Oropeza haven’t voted, and Maldonado could always flip his vote.

UPDATE by Dave: This is going to be a long night.  They couldn’t even get votes for the first provision, where the details of it haven’t even been determined?

…I’m out for a bit, so Robert will take you through the madness.

UPDATE by Robert: SoCal activists led by Marta Evry are asking folks to contact Oropeza’s office to ask her to vote no – (916) 651-4028.

…Abel Maldonado lays out the Zombie Death Cult strategy:

I’ve known dennis hollingsworth for 10 years and in every budget he would say “the longer we wait. The better it gets” what’s he think now

I’m guessing Maldonado and Zed aren’t exactly BFF.

…Oropeza shows up and votes Aye, and Strickland flips from No to Aye. One more yes vote and they’ll have passed the first of 31 budget bills. Gonna be a looooong night.

…Runner flips from No to Aye and the measure passes – but not before Mark DeSaulnier gets his No vote in. I’m pleased that DeSaulnier is voting no, but he needs to vote no from the outset and not sneak it in when it already has passed.

…Dave Cogdill is trying to push an amendment to end state funding of abortion. Dems are going to table this bullshit (and the amendment dies).

…health bill passes more easily, 29-11.

…AB 6, Medi-Cal cuts, pass 39-0.

…list of bills and their overall impact is here. Not all bills are available in full detail.

…after the drama on the first bill, the others are pretty much flying right by. The pattern is clear: All Dems vote yes, with usually just enough Repubs to get to the 2/3 level (27 votes). Republicans get their budget and then make Democrats vote for it. No Democrat has yet explained why the hell they are going along with this.

…right now they’re going after the low hanging fruit. The difficult bills – as @capitolweekly notes, the difficult ones are education, welfare, and local government – are being bypassed for now.

…AB 5, which passed 29-11, will cause about 775,000 children to lose their health care coverage. Senator Ducheny (Dem) said she hopes First 5 will come through with funds to save that program. In other words, the legislature is trying to enact Prop 1D even after voters rejected it on May 19.

…AB 22 will sell off some state property, including the OC Fairgrounds. Jeff Denham wants more property to be sold and hints Republicans will demand more sales the next time the legislature has to fix the budget (likely around November). All this is happening under a CEQA exemption agreed to in February, which is now gaining the status of precedent. Democrats are routinizing the giving away of the store. At least everyone voted for this – passed 39-0.

…Senate is on break for caucusing ahead of the tough votes. Assembly is passing the bills the Senate just passed.

Budget votes, originally scheduled in the Legislature for 2:00, have now been pushed back multiple times.  The lastest word we have is 7:00 or 8:00, according to Karen Bass.

One major hurdle seems to be the securitization of redevelopment agency funds, which would net about $7.4 billion dollars over the life of the borrowing.  Yesterday, Mark DeSaulnier described that provision to me as both “insane” and “illegal.”  Insane I expect, but illegal would mean that it could not be enacted tonight.  And we are now hearing from several sources that the redevelopment legality is throwing a wrench into the budget package.

Remember, this is something that City of Industry lobbyists have been seeking for years, primarily so they can fund an outdoor stadium and attract an NFL franchise.  The way that it’s been structured, according to reports, is that this borrowing maneuver, which would tie up about 10% of total property tax revenue for up to 30 years, would replace the seizure of local government funds through Prop. 1A and HUTA (the gas tax).  If the redevelopment securitization gets shot down, the borrowing would come from the above.

This was described to me last night by DeSaulnier as a shadow play, so Dennis Hollingsworth and his buddies can say they tried not to take from local governments.  But it’s completely unclear whether anyone would vote to take those funds through Prop. 1A and HUTA, which would blow enough of a hole to scuttle the deal.

…The State Senate is in session right now.  You can watch at CalChannel.

They’re voting to suspend the rules to allow votes to happen tonight.  It went through unanimously except for Wyland (R).

…The first bill of the series is the prison bill, which just allocates the reduction in funding. Denham has a poison pill amendment to actually set out the policy, which the Yacht Party kicked and screamed that the Democrats were trying to do.  The amendments got tabled.  What nonsense.

I’ll start a new thread.

Well, it’s going to be a late night.  The Legislature is set to convene at 2pm to consider the budget deal.  Here’s the Assembly floor report.  I could write another “25 Things” just off of this document, some of the bits buried in there are amazing.  Here’s just one example:

Eliminates automatic cost of living adjustments (COLA) for CalWORKs and SSI/SSP grants.  Also eliminates COLA’s for the budgets of UC, CSU, and other state departments.

Also, IHSS workers, who make $12 bucks an hour, may have to pay for their OWN criminal background checks and fingerprinting.  Just for bureaucratic-speak, I also like the absurdity of this: “Consolidates the Bureau of Electronic Appliance Repair and the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation into the Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, Home Furnishings, and Thermal Insulation.”  Done!

This will not be an easy vote.  Democratic lawmakers in the rank and file are unlikely to rubber stamp this.  In addition to Sen. DeSaulnier, I’m hearing that many other lawmakers are uncomfortable on a variety of measures, to the extent that the Assembly Speaker is not whipping votes on the offshore drilling proposal or the dissolution of the Integrated Waste Management Board (which costs $0.00 for the state).  The City of Industry lobbyist-backed deal to securitize redevelopment project money and tangle 10% of property tax revenue for up to 30 years isn’t a done deal, either.

A provision of the budget agreement, which faces a vote in the Legislature as early as today, would extend the life of the state’s redevelopment areas, a proposal that Industry officials have pushed for more than two years. Critics say the move would be a gift of public funds to benefit the proposed stadium and other private development at the expense of cities and counties that need the money for healthcare, welfare and police services.

A similar measure backed by Industry died in the Legislature last year after complaints from local government officials. But late in the budget negotiations, the city and its allies helped revive the proposal.

“They were able to find a mechanism to provide the infrastructure for an NFL stadium, but they aren’t able to find the mechanism to fund nutrition for a hungry child,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said Wednesday. “It’s galling. It’s really galling.”

AFSCME is running ads against the whole budget deal, and most advocacy groups have been quite critical.  I would guess that most people in the Assembly have the perspective of indie Juan Arambula, that he’ll vote for most of the budget “with a heavy heart and a clothespin on my nose.”  But I think some provisions could easily get struck down today, so it’s worth letting lawmakers know what you think.

I interviewed Sen. Mark DeSaulnier just a few minutes ago for a series on CA-10 candidates.  But I took the opportunity to ask him about the budget deal.  Un unusually blunt and what I would characterize as irate language, DeSaulnier blasted the budget and the process that created it.  “It’s all awful,” he said.  “On a majority-vote level, with votes that require a majority vote, California still leads the nation.  But on a fiscal level, we’re living in the Dark Ages.  The system is completely dysfunctional and maybe the only good thing is that people will finally see the kind of change we need.  Sadly, too many people are still in denial about that change.  But we can’t go on like this.  It’s just a mess.”

DeSaulnier thinks that the economy is unlikely to change dramatically to bail out this budget, and it will take a long time for General Fund revenues to get to a point to pay off the money borrowed from education.  And so we’ll remain in this dark place for some time.

The Senator is carrying a bill in the legislature to put together a Constitutional convention, and he is “more convinced than ever” about the need for it.  He believes that, after the budget is put the bed, there is an urgent need, recognized by the leadership, to turn completely to reform.  Sen. Steinberg has said to him that the message will be nothing but change, change, change.  And the caucus wants to work, whether through a revision commission or reforms that could be put together with majority support, to do a “Constitutional convention in the building.”  Unfortunately, DeSaulnier said, everyone on both sides of the aisle immediately goes to the worst-case scenario of a convention, thinking that their gains and protections will be lost.  But that’s no excuse.  DeSaulnier hoped he could get with Republican leaders like Sam Blakeslee to find common ground on a few reform issues, but he’s not sanguine about those choices.  “They’re individually good people, but put them together and they’re a cult, not a party.  Milton Friedman’s dead, move on.”

When I asked what he would vote for on Thursday, he said “I will probably vote against most of it.”  DeSaulnier singled out two pieces that could not get his support: the offshore drilling in Tranquillon Ridge, and the raid on local governments.  On the drilling, he doesn’t understand why Democrats would approve such a proposal for a paltry $100 million dollars in this budget year.  “I don’t know why the Governor would do that.  Whatever environmental record he claims to have will go down the tubes.  I never thought he was particularly green to begin with, he tried to slow-walk AB32 and all sorts of environmental initiatives.  He’s the worst Governor in state history, just like George W. Bush was the worst President in history.

On the local government raid, DeSaulnier said that as someone who came from local government, he could not see clear to essentially bankrupt them.  Those takings don’t take place until December, according to him, so he would rather get the LAO involved, score the kinds of tax credits at the local level, things like enterprise zones that don’t work and other giveaways to corporate interests, and suspend them to make local government whole.  I think it’s an interesting strategy, though I don’t know if it could succeed.  Tying it to local government needs is smart.

And by the way, the crazy redevelopment money scheme, to borrow against those future funds and securitize 10% of property taxes for 10-20 years?  DeSaulnier called that “insane” and “illegal,” and just a shadow play by Republicans “so they can go back to San Diego and Riverside and say they tried to save their local money and failed.”

DeSaulnier has an election coming up, and thus an incentive to take a bold stand.  But this is pretty darn bold.  And if there are enough Democrats to go along with him, Republicans may indeed be forced to own this budget.

It looks like the Governor and the Legislature have resolved the issue over prison reform in the budget by setting that piece aside as a separate issue to be decided later.

Legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger defused an issue today that threatened to blow up a fragile compromise over the plan to erase the state’s $26.3-billion budget deficit.

Instead, Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, said both houses would vote on the plan Thursday night – but without an element that would prescribe details of a $1.2 billion cut in spending on prisons. A vote on that part of the plan will be delayed until next month, the leaders said.

“Everything’s on track,” said Steinberg, after he and Bass met privately with Schwarzenegger in his office. The governor popped out after the Democratic leaders left to dismiss the issue as just one of “some hiccups, and some obstacles and bumps in the road … there will be some difficult moments, but the bottom line is we are going to get this budget done.”

I see, so a plank of the budget that involves policy changes will be put off until another time.

Gee, that doesn’t seem to be the accommodation made for privatizing the welfare enrollment process.  Or enacting measures like background checks and fingerprinting for IHSS clients and recipients.  Or drilling at Tranquillon Ridge.  Or selling the State Compensation Insurance Fund.  Or the lobbyist-fueled deal to extend redevelopment projects and borrow against the funds.  All of those are huge policy changes, some of them unrelated to the current budget, that reflect mainly conservative perspectives.  They must be passed now, now, now, but because Republicans threw a fit and distorted the intent, a pretty modest (though necessary) prison reform part of the package, with savings of $1.2 billion dollars, gets delayed.

These dead of night budget deals and the disproportionate urgency placed on them are fruits of a poisoned, horrible broken process for determining budgets in this state.  It’s why everyone with a brain considers this not only a bad deal but one we’ll have to revisit in a few months anyway.

And this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the shame of the Democrats for giving in on virtually every part of this negotiation, without exception, and for failing to show the leadership for thirty years necessary to stand up to a broken process and actually do something about it.

In most public schools expect larger classes, fewer counselors and librarians, and a slimmer menu of arts classes and athletic programs — and maybe a tighter array of courses generally. More subtly, the quality of all services, from graduate programs at Berkeley to the condition – and maybe the safety – of the neighborhood park will decline. Will any of those things – and there are countless more – bring the realization that you can’t have a great state, or maybe even a decent one, on the cheap?

What’s badly wanted here is political leadership with courageous enough to talk about that link and not celebrate surrender to the anti-tax fanatics of the right. In this current budget deal, the Democrats got a few face-savers on education funding and welfare reductions, but in the end, despite all the nervous smiles, they lost.

The New York Times today writes that a “pinch of reality” has threatened the California dream.  Yet the political leadership still live in dreamworld, seemingly satisfied with the broken structure of government, confined to a short-term strategy and a political process that works for them as individuals but for none of their constituents, and just unable to operate against a minority the public hates but which runs circles around them.  We have deferred that California dream for so long that it may be unable to get it back.  But without a functioning democracy, and with a majority leadership that has practically abdicated responsibility in the face of a conservative veto, you can be sure of that proposition.

This is a big deal.  John Burton just sent out an action alert to CDP delegates and supporters urging them to vote AGAINST an element of the budget negotiated by the Democratic leadership.  Specifically, he wants the offshore drilling at Tranquillon Ridge voted down.

As you may have heard, legislative leaders and the governor have reached a tentative budget deal that the Senate and Assembly could vote on as soon as tomorrow.

One part of the package is a Republican-written bill that would allow offshore drilling in state-controlled waters off California’s coast for the first time since the devastating 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast. This proposal is an affront to all Californians and we must urge lawmakers to vote it down.

This sweetheart deal for one oil company was negotiated behind closed doors, without any legislative hearings to allow public comment.

It strips the State Lands Commission – which has approved or rejected oil leases for the past 150 years – of this power and gives it to a commission controlled by the governor’s administration. This commission would have unlimited authority to rewrite the lease to benefit the oil company.

The offshore drilling plan does not solve either this year’s budget problems or systemic problems. That’s because its promises of future revenue are not actually written into law.

This Republican offshore drilling scheme endangers California’s environment. It would further pad the pockets of oil executives. And it does virtually nothing to solve the state’s current or future budget problems.

Ironically, the same Republican legislators who support this sweetheart deal are the ones who refused to vote for our Democratic leaders’ proposal for an oil-severance tax like the one levied in every other oil-producing state.

Please call your local lawmaker and urge him or her to say NO to new offshore drilling. Say NO to jeopardizing our coastline for minimal budget help this year or in the future.

At the end of the email, Burton reminds readers that these kind of backroom deals are part of why “it’s so important to have a majority-vote budget in California so Republicans cannot hijack the budget process to make bad policy changes that are extraneous to the state budget.”  A-men to that, but tell it to the Democratic leaders who helped negotiate this.

Karen Bass was asked today by reporters why the offshore drilling bill was included in the budget agreement, and she replied, “It comes down to $100 million dollars.”  Apparently you can put a price on despoiling the coastline and destroying the environment.  Turns out it’s 1/880th of total budgetary spending.

It’s good to see the Chairman of the CDP picking up on a campaign by the Courage Campaign and amplifying it.  The offshore drilling plan will be considered in a separate trailer bill.  It can be defeated.

If you get a chance, take a listen to Warren Olney’s Which Way, LA? tonight.  You can find it right here.

The California portion starts about halfway in, at around 28:40.

So Warren Olney describes the craptacular deal, and then has two lawmakers on to talk about it.  First up is Bonnie Lowenthal, who is positively ebullient about the prospect of selling out local governments and breaking the very fabric of the social safety net.  Asked if she’ll vote for the budget, she goes “I certainly am!”  Olney, incredulously, lists the scope of the cuts, but she replies, “We have a deal, the stalemate is done, the IOUs will be over!”  Later in the show, she enlightens us that it’s better to have something than nothing, and that we saved the “framework” – not the funding, just the framework – of most programs.

Then Chuck DeVore comes on.  Now DeVore is running for US Senate, and needs to be as crazy as he wants to be.  So Olney asks him if he’s voting for the budget.  And he says he hasn’t read it, but it didn’t go far enough with the “reforms” and cuts to programs.  (He also uses the spanking new right-wing canard that California has 12% of the population and 32% of the welfare recipients, which is only true if you count all kinds of services that other states don’t consider welfare as welfare) Then Olney says that there were no new taxes in the deal, and DeVore hails that, and eventually says “this is the best compromise we could possibly get.”  And Olney says, “So then you’ll vote for it.”  And DeVore says “No.”

I guess DeVore didn’t get handed his talking points that he’s supposed to throw a hissy fit about a fake report in the LA Times regarding early release, almost certainly planted by Sam Blakeslee to give cover to Yacht Partiers who want to vote against the budget.

I don’t think you could encapsulate the strategy and approach of the two parties better in a work of fiction.  Lowenthal is just pleased as punch for everything to be over, DeVore knows he can get more and doesn’t want any part of his own handiwork so Democrats can be blamed for the consequences.  One side looks only to put out immediate fires and the other has a long game strategy playing out over decades.

It is not pleasing to be a Democrat at this juncture.

Very interesting stuff going on.

This afternoon we got the Leak of the Week from Capitol Weekly – a look at Dennis Hollingsworth’s letter to his entire caucus.  It’s in budget-ese, but Zed is positively giddy about all the cuts to social services, all the denial of fee increases, and he’s basically telling his caucus they got everything they wanted.  It was good to see the inside thinking, especially if Yacht Party members turned around and voted against the budget.  They know that their preferred option is deeply unpopular, and would rather distance themselves from this solution and make the Democrats own the budget.  So this was a key document counteracting that.

Then at around 2:30, Michael Rothfeld changed his original process story about legislators building support for the deal into this bombshell:

The state budget deal negotiated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders would reduce the population of California prisons by nearly 27,000 inmates in the current fiscal year.

That would be done with a combination of new measures, including allowing some inmates to finish their sentences on home detention, creating new incentives for completion of rehabilitation programs and scaling back parole supervision for the least serious offenders.

The proposal, details of which were obtained by The Times, would save a total of $1.2 billion in the coming year.

It is unclear whether Republicans will vote for a budget plan that includes reduction of the state prison system, which now houses 170,000 inmates. Some GOP votes are needed to pass a budget in California.

If Republicans demur, the Democrats who dominate the Legislature could approve the prison proposal as separate legislation with a simple majority vote, which would not require GOP support […]

The budget plan also would create a sentencing commission to reexamine the state penal code, which would not save money immediately but would advance plans under discussion by lawmakers for years. The commission would be charged with establishing new sentencing guidelines by July 1, 2012.

Prisons are slated for $1.2 billion in cuts in the budget, and most stories last night claimed that included no early release.  Clearly Republicans – and possibly the Governor – saw those cuts as best employed by turning the prisons into Public Storage units, cutting all drug treatment and vocational training programs and reducing corrections officer overtime.  So this looked to be a bait-and-switch by the Democratic legislature.

Except nobody seems to know how the LA Times got this story.  And less than an hour later, Sam Blakeslee alerts the media:

Throughout budget negotiations we insisted that Republican votes would never be provided for a budget deal that included early release of prisoners.

Our caucus and staff developed a cut strategy for corrections that provided the necessary savings to close the deficit without risking public safety.

We had a clear understanding with the democrats that NO corrections bill would be a part of the budget and that we would have an honest chance to contest the policy issues in the light of day in August.  

Just two hours ago I learned from staff that Senate democrats are concocting a radioactive corrections bill that includeds the worst of the worst _ sentencing commission and release of 27,000 prisoners, etc

When I spoke with Dennis he was as surprised and upset as I was regarding what appears to be a serious breach of the agreement in the Big 5.

I have called and personally told both Karen and Darrell that their will be no republican votes for any portion of the budget if they allow such a bill to be part of the package.

This seems just a little too neat to me.  This report was leaked to the Times anonymously, after a separate email from the Senate GOP gets leaked showing what a great snow job they think they got over the Democrats.  And then Blakeslee has an email out to his caucus – within less than an hour of the story leak – that comes up with a credible reason to shut down the deal, blaming those double-crossing Democrats.

FWIW I’d love a sentencing commission/early release of nonviolent offenders bill to become a reality, but I hardly believe that Senate Democrats, who as a caucus have participated in 30 years’ worth of sentencing increases, and who scuttled a sentencing commission bill from Gloria Romero just last year, would sneak this into a budget bill out of nowhere, with complete language less than a day after a deal was reached.  It would be completely out of line with prior history.  It doesn’t scan at all.  

But it’s sure a bonne chance for Republicans to have this fall in their lap…

…Discussion in OC Progressive’s diary.

…OK, so the Governor’s Corrections Secy is briefing reporters.  And will you look at that, the Times’ story was wrong, as was Asm. Blakeslee!  The report of 27,000 released is misleading, says the Secretary, but the Administration is interested in some reforms, including a sentencing commission.  Wow, that’s great, at least in theory.  They are offering early release credits that would maybe release 1,700 total.  This looks more and more like a coordinated hissy fit laundered through a compliant media.