CALIFORNIA BRIEFING / SACRAMENTO

After playing coy for weeks, the powerful Service Employees International Union on Monday joined a new coalition opposed to Proposition 1A, the May 19 ballot measure intended to help stabilize the state’s teetering budget.

But the union, which represents a majority of the state government workforce, remains silent about how much money it’s willing to spend.

In the electoral calculus, it’s big dollars that count. A healthy war chest is needed to fund mass mailings and ads on radio and other media to spread the opposition gospel -- that Proposition 1A was drafted on the run by Sacramento politicians and is “fatally flawed.”

Proposition 1A would extend the recently adopted tax increases for two years, sending more than $16 billion in additional revenue to state coffers while also putting limits on state spending and creating a “rainy day” fund.

Government employee unions typically have resisted spending caps that could hurt the programs that employ their workers. Besides the SEIU California State Council, groups participating in the coalition include the California Faculty Assn. and the California Federation of Teachers.

-- Eric Bailey