When Jerry Brown took over the Horseshoe, there was some thought that now we would finally be able to get of really good progressive legislation enacted. Turns out that wasn’t entirely true, but nor was it entirely false.
Today, the Governor signed Mark Leno’s SB 48, a bill that ensures that the historical contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and disabled individuals are accurately and fairly portrayed in instructional materials by adding these groups to the existing list of under-represented cultural and ethnic groups already included in the state’s inclusionary education requirements. As it stands right now, the state requires inclusion of minority groups contributions to the state, this law simply adds on the disabled and LGBT to that list.
From an immediate standpoint, this probably means that students are going to learn a thing or two about Harvey Milk in their history classes. But in the long run, this bill will help decrease bullying and protect LGBT youth in our schools.
“I am awed and humbled to be part of this historic moment,” said Carolyn Laub, Executive Director of Gay-Straight Alliance Network. “By signing the FAIR Education Act and ending the exclusion of the LGBT community from instructional materials, Governor Brown has realized the hopes of youth who have been fighting for safe and inclusive schools, where all students learn about our history and gain respect for each other’s differences as a result. This is a part of the American story that we can be proud to know all students will learn.”
You see that picture on the right? Notice anything missing? Well, Republicans for one. And, you know, they typical fanfare for these things, as only three media folk were allowed in. Hardly the big campaign-starting event that Jerry had hoped for.
So, what now? The Republicans, through their own obstinacy continue their slide toward irrelevance. And what of Jerry Brown? Hardly a progressive champion that some had hoped, or even the good ol’ fashioned dealmaker that he had sold. Not for lack of trying, but today’s Republicans are a different breed than those of a generation ago.
What can we do to build any sort of long-term plan for California’s budget. I’ve heard many plans over the six years that I’ve been running Calitics, but none have really come to pass. Maybe the next one?
(I’ll be on Friday’s episode of Your Call Radio to discuss the budget. More info at http://yourcallradio.org – promoted by Brian Leubitz)
A few posts below this, you’ll see a post from a member of the press team of my former employer, Kamala Harris, arguing against the cuts to the AG’s office. And it won’t take you all that much Googling to find similar complaints from other quarters. Most interestingly, the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court is blasting it:
“The cumulative impact of the cuts to the courts in the last three years will have the effect of court closures, fewer services to court users, and the spectre of more furloughs and layoffs for employees,” she said in a prepared statement. “It will affect everyone and anyone connected to the courts in civil cases, criminal cases, family law, probate, and small claims.”
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“These cuts are unsustainable and incompatible with equal justice for all,” Cantil-Sakauye warned. “This is a sad day for justice in California.”(Fresno Bee)
The Courts were handed $350 million in cuts, and another $100 million was raided from their building funds. Not exactly the way to win friends in the judiciary if any of your legislation comes through, I suppose. But the cuts to courts are really more pernicious than that, as you can end up with criminal defendants denied their rights to speedy trials and other consititional protections. I have faith in the courts to work some magic to try to balance their competing interest, but this is a very worrisome cut.
On something of a tangent, it might be worthwhile to look at ensuring that all court costs are properly being paid by all parties in litigation. I don’t blame the courts for this, but on occasion, you’ll find defendants can get off without paying their share of court costs depending on timing of a settlement or other proceedings.
But really, this budget is filled with worrisome cuts. Deep cuts to higher education that will force higher taxes tuition for students. Delays to K12 funding that will challenge our teachers and hurt our next generation. And, as noted already, some very real cuts to law enforcement. As Sen. Steinberg has pointed out several times in the press, we are now at one of the most austere budgets in a generation or more.
But even with this austerity, we have not arrived at anything representing stability. There are a plethora of reasons for that, but the biggest of all of these is clearly Prop 13’s insistence on a preference for income and sales taxes over the more stable property tax. Sure, this budget includes the Amazon tax provisions championed by Sen. Hancock and Asm. Skinner, but these revenue sources are hardly sufficient to overcome the loss of the taxes at the end of the month.
As the dominoes fall from this budget, expect instability to continue to raise its head. Already several counties have discussed applying a local tax to recover some of the cuts from the loss of the sales tax. Expect such a measure to appear to show up as soon as the November ballot in San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere next year.
These funding levels themselves are unsustainable for the long haul. Eventually things fall apart. Infrastructure crumbles, the mentally ill are exposed through homelessness and crime, and the state becomes a less welcoming place for rich and poor alike. And when you talk about business friendly climates, stability is always at the top of the list. For so long we have been able to balance the act through super glue, chewing gum and duct tape. And so it goes this year, with the “triggers” being this year’s duct tape.
But for all the drama of the past few months, the Republicans have to look back at this process with some fondess and some regret. Ultimately they got what was their stated goal of drastic cuts. But because of their obstinacy, the rest of their ransom note got essentially nowhere. Perhaps that can be some consolation to progressives as we try our best to make do with what is pretty much a disaster budget.
This was supposed to be the year that we got some breathing room for the budget that allowed us to do some long-range planning and to drastically reduce some of this instability. Clearly that didn’t happen, but don’t be surprised to see some sort of revenue measure on the November 2012 budget.
Last night a crowd of farmworkers, UFW leaders, and Democratic legislators gathered in front of Governor Jerry Brown’s Capitol office, awaiting word on whether he would sign SB 104, a bill that would help farmworker safety and prosperity by allowing them to organize unions via card check. The UFW pushed it after a rash of heat-related deaths in the fields in recent years, deaths that could have been prevented if more farmworkers had unions to protect them.
Brown had played up his connections to Cesar Chavez and the UFW during the campaign, and notably signed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975 recognizing the right of farmworkers to organize unions.
The governor’s office had been silent on the bill, not giving any indication what he would do. As the midnight deadline for action approached, the crowd grew, especially after the legislature approved the budget, hoping for good news.
Instead they received a shock as Governor Brown vetoed SB 104, siding with big business over farmworkers. Brown’s veto message doesn’t really give any explanation for the veto, except that it changes the ALRA which, apparently, Brown wants to keep taking credit for even after its shortcomings have been revealed:
SB 104 is indeed a drastic change and I appreciate the frustrations that have given rise to it. But, I am not yet convinced that the far reaching proposals of this bill–which alter in a significant way the guiding assumptions of the ALRA–are justified. Before restructuring California’s carefully crafted agricultural labor law, it is only right that the legislature consider legal provisions that more carefully track its original framework. The process should include all those who are affected by the ALRA.
In other words, Brown wants something that will make agribusiness happy – the same people who have shown no concern over farmworker heat deaths, who are happy to continue to pay workers poorly.
This is one of the problems you get with bringing back a former governor to office. Brown basically thinks nothing has changed in 36 years and that despite the proven shortcomings of the ALRA, it is fine and doesn’t need to be fixed, especially if it makes agribusiness sad.
Of course, Brown pulled shit like this all the time when he was governor in the 1970s and 1980s, vetoing or opposing legislation that his allies strongly backed. It infuriated Democrats and helped give an opening to the right. More of that crap is the price we paid for beating Meg Whitman.
If all-cuts budgets and vetoing labor legislation is what we’re going to get from Governor Brown, let’s hope he decides on only one term, and lets California move on to better leadership in 2014.
I was at the San Francisco redistricting commission hearing, so I missed a rather major breakthrough in the budget negotiations: a deal between the Legislature and the Governor.
Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders announced today that they have reached an agreement on a new majority-vote budget plan.
“We’ve had some tough discussions, but I can tell you that the Democrats in both the Senate and the Assembly have now joined with the administration and myself and we have a very good plan going forward with the budget,” Brown said at a press conference in his office this afternoon.
The proposal, outlined in this post, assumes that the state will bring in an additional $4 billion in revenues in the upcoming fiscal year, based in part on higher-than-expected revenue figures in recent months. If those revenues fail to materialize, steeper cuts to programs including K-12 schools, higher education, public safety programs and In-Home Supportive Services would occur later in the year.
“We have severe trigger cuts that will be triggered and go into effect (without the projected revenues),” Brown said. “And those are real.”(SacBee)
The cuts are very real and very substantial. However, they were cut by an additional $4b in extra revenue that wasn’t previously accounted for. The “trigger” makes Ana Matosantos quite a powerful person as she has to certify how much of that revenue has actually shown up. I guess you could play with semantics for a while to determine whether this is actually a “gimmick,” but it does push off some of the really hard decisions until next year.
Ultimately, this budget does what our previous budgets have done, it gets us into next year. And the cuts are simply devestating. At some point, we have to address the structural deficit, and this doesn’t do it. Whether that is through a long-term reform like Prop 13 changes, or through a more temporary tax program, something has to change.
More details of the budget should come out tomorrow.
You don’t have to dig too hard in the Calitics archives to find our disdain for Prop 13. Or for that matter, I doubt many astute observers of politics would be surprised at the position repeated here many times. However, it has been so sacrosanct for so long, that few have dared to touch it. Sure, there have been a few haphazard attempts to tweak it, or even “split the rolls” by allowing reassessment of commercial property. The one that comes to mind first is Phil Ting’s recent Close the Loophole campaign.
But nothing really took off. We’ve been stuck with Prop 13 for an entire generation with no real signs of movement. It’s strangled our schools, left us with a wildly variable tax base, and led to many a budget crisis over the years.
But Jerry Brown understands that it is the third rail. After all, some point the finger to his administration’s slow reaction to the growing anti-tax movement in the 1970s. And it was Brown who proclaimed himself a “born again tax cutter” after it passed. So he’s not going to challenge it directly. But, you know, those mean unions, they aren’t down with the big landlords like he is. They are really something of a wild card that he can’t really control:
Gov. Jerry Brown hinted Thursday that if the budget talks with Republicans break down, the initiative fight that would follow would not be limited to Brown’s plans to raise sales, vehicle and income taxes. He said he expects labor groups to pursue changes to Proposition 13, tweaking the current caps on commercial property taxes, if no bipartisan deal can be reached.
“I would expect there will be efforts to accelerate the reassessment of commercial property tax,” Brown said. (LA Times)
Of course, such a campaign would be bloody and expensive. It certainly won’t be taken up lightly. That being said, if you want stability, and you want tax equity, Prop 13 is the big target on the board.
Well, Jerry Brown’s original plan to let the people vote on tax extensions has apparently been scuttled by the Republican minority, and the Governor is going back to the drawing board. It is not pretty:
Gov. Jerry Brown told Democratic lawmakers Tuesday that he was preparing an alternative to his budget proposal and would present it to Democratic leaders as early as Wednesday.
Brown’s statements were confirmed by multiple lawmakers who attended closed-door meetings with the governor and his senior aides Tuesday. Brown spokesman Gil Duran said the administration had no immediate comment.
Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, described Brown as “fairly circumspect” about this alternative proposal, which is expected to include deeper cuts to state programs in place of the higher vehicle, sales and income taxes Brown originally proposed. (LA Times)
The breadth and depth of these cuts is still unclear. Also unclear is whether there will be private attempts to get some sort of revenue into the system. Of course, the legislature and Governor would have to call a special election to get anything done before next year’s primaries, but that only requires a majority vote.
I’m not sure how we manage this exactly. Perhaps the cuts will be of such a public and visible nature that we can win a revenue measure next year? At any rate, it is hard to argue in any way that a cuts only budget is in any way a good solution.
Well, Jerry Brown, you fooled me. Yesterday I said that you would probably wait on the budget bill for a week or two as you tried to negotiate a deal with the Republicans. Well, apparently you didn’t even want the stench of it on your desk:
Gov. Jerry Brown will veto his own party’s budget on Thursday, less than 24 hours after Democratic lawmakers sent him a majority-vote plan balanced with risky solutions, according to sources in the Legislature.
The Democratic governor said during his campaign and throughout this year he would not sign a budget filled with “gimmicks,” though he suggested earlier this week he had relaxed that stance.(SacBee)
UPDATE: The Governor has posted a video about the veto, basically saying that he’s not going to kick the can down the road. Good for him, and likely good for the people of the State of California. At least we can hope that we’ll never see the stupid sale/leaseback again.
Now, as to the question raised about the legislators’ salaries, commentor DarwinBG is right, they will continue to get paid. Basically Prop 25 requires that the Legislators pass a budget, not actually impliment it. I’ll check back if the June 30/July 1 deadline has any significance on that front, but I don’t think so.
UPDATE 2: Well, it appears that John Chiang isn’t quite so sure whether yesterday’s budget passed the smell test.
Controller John Chiang spokeswoman Hallye Jordan said Wednesday that Chiang had not yet reviewed the budget bills. The Democratic controller, who issues state paychecks, determined earlier this month that Proposition 25 requires lawmakers to send the governor a “balanced budget” to meet the pay requirement.
Brown said in his letter to lawmakers Thursday, “Unfortunately, the budget I have received is not a balanced solution” and that it was “not financeable.” Jordan was not immediately available Thursday to say whether the controller would issue paychecks to lawmakers in light of the governor’s message and veto. Proposition 25 does not speak to a balanced budget requirement, but Chiang included that interpretation two weeks before the deadline.(SacBee)
If this lingers on for very long, the question of “balanced” might end up becoming the stuff a legal case is made of. For the time being, if they miss a week or two of paychecks, no legislator is going to make a big stink. If it runs longer, well, maybe a termed-out legislator decides that he (or she) wants that paycheck after all and doesn’t like Chiang’s interpretation. But that will still be a while.
Gov. Jerry Brown still has public support for his tax plan, but the margin has slipped, and so has his public approval rating, according to a Field Poll released today. … Though Brown’s public approval rating has slipped just two percentage points since March, to 46 percent, many Californians who previously were undecided about Brown made up their minds against him. Thirty-one percent of voters disapprove of Brown’s job performance, up from 21 percent in March.
“Three months ago he was still in his honeymoon period with voters,” Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said. “Now I think what you’re seeing is more of a return to normal.”
Fifty-two percent of registered voters surveyed said they would be willing to extend temporary tax increases to close the state’s remaining $9.6 billion budget deficit, a drop of nine percentage points from March.(SacBee)
That last number, for the tax extensions, is in some highly dangerous territory. It is not hard to imagine the campaign that could lure away 3% of those voters to vote no. Also, turnout models for a September election would be extremely difficult to model, so take some grain of salt here.
