[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Governor Will Release Budget Changes on May 14th
Advocates Fear More Cuts Likely - Pressure Rises to Increase Revenues

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By John Laird
Chair of
Assembly Budget Committee and
Conference Committee on the Budget

The final state budget has been signed by the governor, and it’s bad news for anyone who looks to the state for health care, lower fees for higher education, human services, public transit, library programs, or protecting parks and the environment.

The budget delay also demonstrated why the budget process is broken. California is one of just three states—the others being Arkansas and Rhode Island—that require a two-thirds vote of each legislative house to approve a budget.

Even though the legislative budget process—highlighted by public hearings and a bi-partisan conference committee—produced a balanced budget on-time, Republican Senators held the budget up for 52 days. The budget that was held up also included the largest budget reserve in the history of the state. And it included no new taxes.

The 14 Senators blocking the budget not only wanted massive cuts in spending, they also wanted to leverage issues that were not even included in the budget, such as Attorney General actions against local governments on the fight against global warming. At one point, they even wanted to get around voters’ disapproval of parental notification for teens receiving reproductive health services.

by Robert in Monterey [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Over the last few months I've been writing about high speed rail and the ongoing legislative efforts to save the project from Arnold's efforts to kill it. As the budget negotiations reach their climax in Sacramento, the future of California's high speed rail project - and of transportation funding itself - remains as uncertain as ever.

As the BayRail Alliance notes, the legislative budget conference committee didn't resolve differences between the chambers on what to do about overall public transportation funding or about high speed rail funding itself. As I noted  last month Arnold is looking to gut public transportation funding to the tune of $1.3 billion. Both the Assembly and the Senate want to restore some or all of this funding but disagreed on how much should be restored.

How does this impact HSR? And why is it critical that HSR get funding in this budget? Keep reading...