Today marks the fifth straight time that California's Legislature and governor failed to deliver a state budget by the July 1 start of a new fiscal year.
Lawmakers have missed that target in 20 of the last 29 years, stopping at least some wheels of government for as long as 67 days while haggling over various issues.
Jean Ross has long watched the process, first as a legislative staffer with the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee and, for the last 10 years, as executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan center in Sacramento that works to improve the economic and social well-being of low- and middle-income Californians. She agreed this week to field these questions:
Question: As much as lawmakers publicly talk about the importance of making that July 1 target, they often fail to achieve it. What is it about the state budget process that causes this?
Answer: On June 15, 62.5% of the Senate and 58.8% of the Assembly voted to support a budget. If California were almost any other state in the nation, approval by these margins would have been sufficient to pass a budget by the June 15 constitutional deadline. That's because California is one of just three states in the country to require a two-thirds or greater margin to pass a state budget under any circumstances. The other two -- Rhode Island and Arkansas -- are substantially smaller and less diverse than California. California's rules allow a small minority of the Legislature to block passage of the budget. More often than not, the two-thirds vote rule leads to lengthy delays in passing a spending plan.
Q: When the deadline has been missed in years past, the sky has never really seemed to fall -- or has it? Is it necessarily a bad thing when a budget isn't produced on time, or does the deadline create positive pressure toward compromise? Are there consequences most people don't see?
A: Bad things do happen when the state begins the budget year without a spending plan. Most notably, the state can't pay many of its bills. Case law defines what bills can and cannot be paid in the absence of a budget, and that law changes from year to year. The state can't, for example, pay vendors who sell goods and services to the state and can't pay child-care centers that care for kids in state child-care programs. For small businesses and nonprofit service providers, lack of timely payment can cause real financial problems.
