Posted on 02/27/2004 7:14:05 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:45:56 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned to Hollywood friend Rob Lowe Friday to help sell his $15 billion state budget bailout then did a block-long test drive for a bus tour that will anchor a weekend campaign blitz to promote his two ballot initiatives.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
"It's us working together to refinance the state debt ... so as to give us a little bit of breathing room to deal with the difficult budget crisis that we face," he said.
"overspending, budget gimmickry and an unwillingness by our leaders to make the tough choices" ...
Things "change", things stay the same.
It sure looks like there is plenty of room for improvement after reading that article... but a lot of stalling and such lies ahead, regardless.
Promised dramatic steps fail to appear
He promised to scour the state's bloated budget books for wasteful government spending, red tape and fraud.
Budget writers who had tried to wring a few more dollars from California's budget in recent years had their doubts. Republican lawmakers, taxpayer groups and blackout-and-red-ink-weary voters cheered.
And Donna Arduin hopped a plane to California.
Schwarzenegger's "genius" -- as he called her Friday -- embarked upon a massive audit of California's books that found in its first stages that the GOP governor had inherited nearly $25 billion in government debt.
By Friday, the second phase of the audit was complete. It findings, administration officials said, were used to build almost every piece of Schwarzenegger's 2004-05 budget plan.
"The politicians have made a mess of the California budget and now it's time to clean it up, and that begins with the budget that I am presenting today," Schwarzenegger said.
"We will reform the way the state does business if it is in corrections, in education, in health and human services, and other areas. State government can spend more wisely."
But Democratic lawmakers and political observers who had braced for some super-creative budget fixes were underwhelmed.
"It doesn't contain the kind of cutting-edge ideas that I had expected to see," said Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, D-Pittsburg. "We could have seen a larger consolidation of state departments and agencies."
Missing in what lawmakers were calling a "conventional" budget is a smoking-gun example of fraud or inefficiency or ambitious plans to board up departments and agencies that duplicate functions.
Those, Arduin said, will come in Phase Three.
She said the administration will meet with lawmakers, experts and representatives from the areas tagged for changes before making wholesale eliminations.
"We've decided to perform a more comprehensive review," Arduin said.
Instead, the budget proposes policy changes in many areas of government -- such as lowering the income threshold for families to share the cost of government child care programs -- and reviews of the way government operates in others -- including an examination of the state's parole system.
Some of the money-saving suggestions that are listed as "key audit findings" in the governor's budget summary are savings that have been proposed previously by the state's nonpartisan legislative analyst, and others were included in past budget plans, such as the proposed closing of a youth corrections camp in Whittier.
Among the audit/budget's findings: Some government-run health care programs' functions are too broadly defined; California's universities should increase student-to-faculty ratios; and so-called regional centers for disabled residents have high administrative costs.
The audit also suggests eliminating the state's power authority, stating "other state energy agencies and private entities already perform similar activities."
Another finding: Tax relief in California far outpaced population and inflation growth during the free-spending boom of the early 2000s that Schwarzenegger often criticizes.
During his State of the State address, Schwarzenegger said: "Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government. I don't want to move boxes around; I want to blow them up."
But some lawmakers said his budget fails to produce any such explosions.
"His budget as announced today is a tacit admission that he did not find fraud and waste in state government in any degree like what he talked about during his campaign," said Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica.
Tom Beamish, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, said perceptions that government can slash billions by rooting out waste and bloat rarely prove true.
"I don't know that it's any fault of Schwarzenegger outside of making promises that are exceedingly difficult to deliver," Beamish said. "It's not about a single person, it's about how you reorganize in the face of extremely entrenched interests."
Even critics of the budget acknowledge that it takes time to wade through this state's enormous bureaucracies.
"To expect a full, complete and wholesale reorganization of state government in less than two months is probably optimistic," he said. "It would seem to me that the budget would have been the perfect place to have at least begun to lay out the case for restructuring."
Schwarzenegger, however, still is determined to slice through the bureaucracy.
"This is," H.D. Palmer, a Department of Finance spokesman, assured, "by no means the last word on this subject."
Which brings me to some of the key changes that needs to be made... a redo of the structure of state government (single body, shortened legislative sessions) and elimination and culling of the plethora of agencies embedded in bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy... add in privatization of some of the services currently provided, and then we can say that real change is afoot.
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