Feb 2nd, 2008
BY: DAVID CARKHUFF

Don’t hold your breath for new funding sources from the state, legislators told the Watsonville City Council Friday as a special meeting of the City Council — the first in the city’s new Civic Plaza — turned into a grim budget review for California.

“It’s really a good time for us to talk about what are our priorities for the state,” said Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, chair of the Local Government Committee. “How do we want to move forward as the eighth largest economy in the world? We’ve got a budget structure that was set up in the 1950s, and we’ve been patching it over with band-aids. It’s a body that’s bleeding, and we’ve been patching it over, and it’s hemorrhaging.”

John Laird, chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, described a patchwork solution from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose budget plan to prevent a projected $14.5 billion deficit by June 2009 involves a mixture of borrowing, accounting adjustments and across-the-board spending cuts.

While Republicans don’t want to talk about tax increases, the flip side is that many people don’t want to face spending cuts, the Democratic legislators said.

A $14.5 billion deficit, out of a $104 billion budget, won’t go away without some pain, Laird said.

“The number is so big there’s no way we can get through this without cuts,” he said.

“What the governor did with his proposal is he just said, ‘Everyone is going to hurt,’ and put it out there,” Caballero said. “So every day we’re getting visits from different organizations showing up saying, ‘Don’t cut me, you can cut them over there.’”

Caballero, as a former Salinas City Council member and mayor, said she entered the legislature “from a city perspective, 15 years of going to Sacramento and saying, ‘Don’t hurt us,’ over and over again.” This approach to defending one’s own turf won’t work this time, she said. While cities may not face the kinds of cuts confronting schools and other government bodies, city officials still should talk to other interested parties and look for ways to collaborate as state funding dries up, she said.

At the state level, meanwhile, Laird said the California Assembly should avoid the temptation of slashing all state spending at the same rate, something Schwarzenegger urged in his budget proposal with roughly 10 percent cuts across the board, which are valued at $9.3 billion in savings. Laird said the California Assembly was elected to make the tough choices of what to pay for and what to eliminate.