Budget

Carnegie Hall is cutting its 2009-10 schedule by 10% because of the recession, instituting a hiring freeze and slashing $4 million from the budget for its current season to keep it balanced. Carnegie executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson says next season's budget will be even lower than the revised $76 million for this season. Carnegie announced a schedule of 180 concerts, down from about 200 in recent seasons. Susan Brady, the hall's director of development, says individual giving for this season was down 17% to 18%, to $11 million.

The board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved a $3.4-billion budget Wednesday for the next fiscal year. About 45% of the budget goes to the MTA's bus system, 23% to the rail system and 18% to improving and building roads. The remainder goes to other expenses. The MTA is awaiting word on whether it could lose as much as $200 million due to the state budget deficit. If that happens, the MTA board would likely have to reopen the budget and find ways to save that money in the coming year, said MTA spokesman Marc Littman.

After an all-day hearing on Orange County's proposed $6.6-billion budget for the coming fiscal year, county supervisors were poised to move forward with a spending plan that was little changed from the original proposal. At the end of the day, during which county department heads presented their budgets and in a few cases asked for more than they were given, the net change to the budget was a reduction of $60,000 in spending but an additional four positions. Some areas are slated to receive large increases in funding, such as an additional $3.1 million to double the number of psychiatric beds in the county to 26, but money to pay for that will come from elsewhere in the budget.

An informal market is springing up online for the IOUs that cash-strapped California began issuing last week, attracting the attention of regulators and state officials. Meanwhile, the state's bonds moved a step closer to "junk" status because of the budget mess that has prompted the state to pay tax refunds and other obligations with the vouchers. Would-be buyers of the scrip, officially called registered warrants, have expressed their interest on Web marketplaces including Craigslist and EBay.

More than 2,000 UCLA employees, including researchers, custodians, nurses and secretaries, gathered at Pauley Pavilion on Wednesday to protest plans for pay cuts and furloughs proposed by the University of California. Because of the state budget crisis, UC leaders are considering three proposals to reduce payroll spending by about $195 million in the next school year.

In recent years, the onset of summer in Phoenix meant two things -- triple-digit temperatures and a budget battle between the Republican-dominated Legislature, which regularly pushed to cut taxes, and Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, who pushed to maintain them to save or expand services. In January, Napolitano moved to Washington to become secretary of Homeland Security, and Jan Brewer, a staunch fiscal conservative who was then Arizona's secretary of state, took her spot.

California voters delivered a potent defeat Tuesday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Capitol lawmakers, dismissing a slate of ballot measures they had championed as a way to fight the state's latest deficit crisis. Just one of the half-dozen measures passed in a special election marked by meager voter turnout: Proposition 1F, which bans salary hikes for Sacramento politicians in deficit years like this one.

A substantial number of the budget revisions that will go before the Legislature today promise no real savings or revenue and would ensure that California's fiscal woes stretch beyond the current crisis into coming years. The Democrat-driven plan, which on paper reduces the state deficit by $23.2 billion, contains $7.2 billion in bookkeeping maneuvers, an analysis of the proposal shows.

As the state weighs cutting about $8.1 billion from public schools, colleges and universities, scores of educators, parents, students and others told lawmakers Monday that such reductions would jeopardize student success and safety in the short term and California's prosperity in the long term.

Nearly 3 1/2 years into a court-ordered suspension of executions, opponents have embraced a new argument: that Californians can't afford to carry out the death penalty in a constitutional manner.