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Posted on 09/13/2003 8:50:24 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
ADD another billion, more or less, to California's budget crisis.
When state lawmakers finally got around to approving a budget, they managed to make the document look a mere $8.1 billion in the red -- significantly lower than the earlier estimate of $38 billion.
But the politicians' dirty little secret is that many of the savings they claim to have achieved were imaginary -- derived from accounting gimmicks, borrowing, and forecasts based on rosy assumptions that had little chance of ever coming true.
One of those rosy predictions was that the state's public-employee unions would agree to forgo the pay raises -- most of which far outpace the rate of inflation -- that they had been promised during contract negotiations, when state negotiators pretended as though California hadn't a financial worry in the world.
All in all, the state budget called for $1.1 billion in layoffs or deferred salary increases, $855 million of that from slashing pay raises this year alone. But so far, with three-quarters of the state's 21 collective bargaining units inking new deals, the total savings are a meager $195 million -- less than a quarter of what Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature promised.
If the remaining unions agree to comparable deals -- and there's little reason to believe they'd agree to more -- the state will save only $470 million, barely half as much as advertised.
The unachieved savings could add as much as $1 billion to the budget gap. And it seems all but inevitable that there will be more such shortfalls to come when other accounting gimmicks fall flat.
For all his friendliness with public-employee unions, Davis couldn't get them to do their fair share in helping bail out the state. It wouldn't have been hard. A simple ultimatum of salary deferments or layoffs probably would have done the trick, but Davis -- facing recall and desperate for labor cash -- wasn't about to start issuing threats.
So he doled out concessions instead. Davis got the unions to accept a one-year deferral on a 5 percent pay increase but had to give various benefits in return. Most notably, all covered state employees will get an additional paid holiday -- every month for the next year.
That's to say, state workers will enjoy 12 more holidays a year on top of the 13 that they -- and few in the private sector -- already get. Or, put another way, they'll work about 5 percent less time in lieu of getting a 5 percent raise.
Seeing that the state can afford to keep its employees idle so many days a year, perhaps it doesn't need all of its employees in the first place. After all, Sacramento lawmakers promised to achieve that $1.1 billion savings through raise deferrals or layoffs, if it couldn't get them through bargaining, maybe it will need to do it through pink slips.
One way or the other, state lawmakers have to live up to their commitments and get the budget balanced. And one way or the other, the unions need to share some of the taxpayers' burden.
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