After looking at the Governor’s May Revision, both of his proposals (which can be found at www.dof.ca.gov) California voters should be appalled. Really, everyone in California should be appalled.
Instead of making tough decisions, the Governor is resorting to scare tactics. He is proposing closure of fire stations and elimination of some firefighting positions. This is a tough decision, but one that needs to be made. The state is responsible for fighting fires in SRAs - state responsibility areas. The Board of Forestry decides what areas in California are SRA, but there are various ways they can do it, and one is to look at the purpose of the land. The biggest firefighting costs have come from the San Diego area, most of the outskirts are still considered SRA - even though they have full fledged communities. San Diego doesn’t have county fire fighters, so if the area isn’t incorporated into San Diego city, then the area isn’t protected. Great. So people are making choices to move into the SRA - which is a designation that is supposed to mean wildlands, not lands where there are communities - and then the state is responsible for firefighting, and these people don’t even have to pay for fire protection. Most every person in California pays for fire protection through local taxes. These people ride on other state taxpayers to provide fire protection for them.
But these cuts won’t hurt the fire fighters. When more fire fighters are needed, Cal Fire hires them under their “emergency” authorization. So in effect, we will still be paying for these fire fighters, whether the actual positions are eliminated or not.
The federal government is mandating that education funding levels be no lower than the 2005-06 levels. This constrains how much the Governor could cut from education. However, K-12 education is still funded at $1 billion over the 2005-06 levels. Higher education is funded at $150 million more than those levels.
Nothing in the May Revision signals that the Governor is willing to reduce benefits to those that the federal government requires. Instead, California is still going to hand out benefits to everyone that are far in excess of what the federal government has.
Additionally, there is $6 billion of borrowing from special funds - and in some cases there is just a raiding of the special fund with no intent to pay it back. Great, let’s make future budgets even harder to balance because of deficit payments.
Here’s the new position that people should take - No on all the ballot measures. The Governor isn’t taking any hard steps, and the Legislature is signaling that it won’t take hard steps either. Assembly leader Karen Bass (D) said that the gap cannot be closed with cuts alone. No, it could, but the cuts would be hard to make and require people to take cuts to pet projects and programs.
If the leaders aren’t willing to take the next steps - say NO to all their requests and make them re-do their plans, and make them lead, not let the voters lead.
