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Meeting the California Budget Challenge: Try This Experiment to Find Out How Difficult it is to Close a Deficit with a Two-Thirds Vote Requirement

By Craig Cheslog
President
Lamorinda Democratic Club

Members of the Lamorinda Democratic Club at its May 16 meeting had the opportunity to consider state spending and revenue policy options just days after Governor Schwarzenegger released his May Revised Budget. The club welcomed the Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization Next 10 to lead us in their innovative California Budget Challenge, which is based on the organization's popular web site.

Next 10 gave LDC club members an instant-response keypad to vote on the various spending and revenue options. These options are modeled on those under consideration by our elected officials in Sacramento. The Contra Costa Times' Lisa Vorderbrueggen attended the meeting and reported on how the challenge worked:

"In an interesting twist, Next 10 imposed a two-thirds voting requirement on the Lamorinda Democrat Club audience Friday in an effort to more closely mimic the state's budget process.

"The Legislature mandates a two-thirds approval for the budget, which means the Republicans can block it until Democrats meet their demands.

"Moving to a simple majority rule would have transformed the club's budget from a $6.9 billion deficit to a $3.7 million surplus.

"Some of the areas where club members couldn't meet the two-thirds threshold included subsidies for the use of fuel-efficient cars, an extension of unemployment jobless benefits or how to pay for ballooning public employee retirement health care costs.

"But the biggest split came over the imposition of a tax on carbon emissions to raise money for the general fund, which would have erased the deficit and created a surplus."

As I noted in remarks at the end of the program, the fact that the two-thirds vote requirement increased the deficit at the end of the challenge unfortunately reflects reality. Despite the rhetoric, the two-thirds vote requirement does not lower deficits or spending. As the 1996 California Constitution Review Commission explained:

In theory a two-thirds vote should force a compromise between the majority and minority parties. For a number of years, the system worked in this manner. Recently, however, it has permitted those who have specific interests, which may or may not be related to the budget, to delay passage of the budget by leveraging their issue into the budget debate. The Citizens Budget Commission found that long budget delays, where a small group of legislators were able to stall budget adoption, caused higher levels of spending. The Commission agreed with that finding. Although conventional wisdom indicates otherwise, the two-thirds vote requirement does not seem to limit higher levels of spending. In practice, it encourages it.(emphasis added)

This is one of the reasons our local legislators are seeking, as Senator Tom Torlakson explained in an April 2008 commentary on the California Progress Report, "to return democracy to the California budget process." Our local Assemblymembers, Loni Hancock and Mark DeSaulnier, are co-authoring Torlakson's SCA 22, an effort to allow California to join the other 47 states with majority-vote budget rules.

The two-thirds vote requirement means that even if Democratic legislators vote unanimously for a budget, they need two Republicans in the Senate and six Republicans in the Assembly to vote with them. With 46 of the 47 Republican members of the Legislature having signed Grover Norquist's "no taxes pledge," the two-thirds vote requirement gives these Republicans the power to block sane budget solutions balanced between spending cuts and revenue increases. If the budget is late, pressure could grow on the Democrats to cut a deal--even one focused only on spending cuts.

This summer our legislators need our support--personally and in the media--to fight back against the devastating education and health and human services cuts proposed by the Governor. Will we have a balanced solution to this budget crisis? Will we confront the $12 billion a year in tax cuts the California Budget Project estimates have been implemented since 1993-94--a major factor in the state's chronic budget problems? Or will Republicans get their way and leave program cuts as the only solution?

Do you know someone, a family member or friend, who lives in a Republican-held Assembly or Senate district? Then please consider getting in touch with them. Have you made your feelings known to the Governor? Have you written to the editor of your local newspaper about the impact of these proposed cuts?

Please take the Next 10 California Budget Challenge by clicking here. Then be ready to take action--our children and vulnerable residents need our help as the budget process moves forward.

In addition to being the president of the Lamorinda Democratic Club, Craig Cheslog serves on Senator Tom Torlakson's staff. This article originally appeared on his blog, Craig Cheslog.

Posted on May 20, 2008

Comments

Does anyone doubt that imposing collective bargaining on civil service provided public employee unions a stranglehold on both State and local public agencies? This has caused the development of large deficits in many public agency budgets, including the State. There is no way to control run away spending.

The premise of collective bargaining is that both sides come to the table as equals. You only have to look at San Diego, Vallejo, the State and most public agencies to understand that equality does not exist in public agency collective bargaining. No one anticipated the consequences of superimposing collective bargaining on civil service. It impacts every public agency, from school districts to police departments to special districts. Unions and civil service features simply give employees too much influence compared to collective bargaining in the real world.
Given the influence of unions in the State legislature (and the Executive branch), change will only be via the Initiative Process . Rather than trying to attack the issue of excessive union influence on a piecemeal basis, an initiative should:
• Prohibit public employees from receiving greater total compensation than comparably qualified employees in the private sector without approval of a majority of voters
• Prohibit public employees from having better working conditions than comparable employees in the private sector.
• Require public services be put out to bid by the private sector if the cost of a public services substantially exceeds cost in the private sector.
Another initiative that could provide control of the State budgeting process would be one that established the Legislative Analysist as an elected constitutional office. The Legislative Analysist would have the authority and responsibility to require that no proposed law, including the annual budget act, be submitted to the Governor for approval unless the Legislative Analysist certified that there was sufficient funding to pay for implementation of the law and a suitable reserve was available.
Although such initiatives are unlikely to be proposed soon, such structural changes will have to be considered at some point in the future.

Posted by: richard mckone at May 20, 2008 03:56 PM

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