Milestone follows budget stability since 2012.

by Brian Leubitz

It’s been a long time, but we did it! Positive cash!

State Controller John Chiang today released his monthly cash report for the month of June, and announced that the state’s General Fund — the primary account from which California funds its day-to-day operations and programs — ended the fiscal year with a positive cash balance for the first time since June 30, 2007. A positive cash balance means that the state had funds available to meet all of its payment obligations without needing to borrow from Wall Street or the $23.8 billion available in its more than 700 internal special funds and accounts.

Now, this is more of a symbolic milestone than anything else. The Controller can shift money around so that there isn’t a huge cost to the taxpayers of having a general fund deficit on one particular day. And the close of a fiscal year isn’t really that much different than any other day.

That being said, this still speaks volumes about where we have come from over the past two years. Since the majority vote budget rules and the Prop 30 tax increases passed, we are on solid footing. We still need to do more to focus on what comes next when the Prop 30 taxes expire, as a simple expiration would just put us back to the boom/bust cycle that we’ve seen for the last 20 years.

But for today, hooray!