Propositions 1A-F are Essential to Balancing the Budget

Authored by Senator Darrell Steinberg, President pro Tempore of the California State Senate

“About the only thing worse than passing them is not passing them.” That’s how the Los Angeles Times editorial page characterized several of the measures on the May 19 ballot - an apt summation.

California faced a gargantuan budget shortfall this year:  $42 billion, or roughly a third of the overall General Fund budget.  The Legislature and Governor acted in February to close the gap and stop the bleeding with a balanced, comprehensive set of solutions-spending cuts, tax increases and new federal funds.  No one is happy with the solutions.  But they were a compromise, and they were necessary for the good of the state.

And while the Legislature did its job by enacting these budget solutions, almost $6 billion of the solutions require voter approval to be implemented.  That’s where Props. 1C, 1D, and 1E come in.

Prop. 1C, the lottery modernization, would generate bond revenues, and the budget assumes we’d get $5 billion.  Public schools will continue to get the same amount of funding they receive today.  We’d get almost another $1 billion by temporarily redirecting some funds from First Five and mental health programs, contained in Props. 1D and 1E.

If 1C, 1D, and 1E all fail, we will have blown a $6 billion hole through our state budget.

What does $6 billion look like?  That’s about what we spend on the University of California and the California State University put together.  It’s well over half what we spend on the Department of Corrections.  Add to that the LAO’s estimate that our recently enacted budget is already $8 billion out of whack, and we are looking at a $14 billion hole.

Now add to that the potential of an even bigger hole if Prop. 1B-which pays $9 billion owed to the schools on a longer term “easy payment plan”-also fails.  Without 1B, the state could find itself owing that $9 billion to schools THIS YEAR.  Now we are looking at a $23 billion abyss.

And that’s just the short-term problem.

Prop. 1A continues $16 billion in taxes for two additional years.  Without that extension, we’ll have another gargantuan shortfall soon.  Continuation of the taxes a bit longer gives our economy, the housing market, and the job market a chance to recover.

Discussing these very real consequences to our state budget if the May 19 measures fail is neither a scare tactic nor a threat - it is our ugly reality.  We are out of options to avoid the hard choices necessary.  The longer we wait to bite the bullet, the longer the patient bleeds red ink.

Taken together, the measures represent $30 billion in public investment that will forestall horrible cuts that will hurt real people.  Given California’s current political climate, it is unlikely that we will see a $30 billion opportunity again anytime soon.  I pray California will not take that chance.