The Best? No Way

Compared with previous speeches, Gov. George Deukmejian virtually waxed vigorous and eloquent in his State of the State address Wednesday night, declaring that California is a superpower of prosperity ready to take on the entire world. California will not stand for standing still, he said.

But when it comes to government, Deukmejian remains a conservative through and through. No pie-in-the-sky expensive dreams for him. On fiscal matters his message was the same as in the past: a balanced budget (he had no choice), a prudent state budget reserve and no general tax increases.

The governor’s limited vision of what government should do was reflected in the cold black and white of his $44.3-billion budget for fiscal 1988-89 released on Thursday. It is a status-quo fiscal plan that will allow the state to muddle through without any real disasters. But it fails to match the governor’s rhetoric of a California that is a magnet for the best and the brightest, ready to compete not just with other American states but also with the biggest industrial countries of the world.

The governor should be commended certainly for pumping an additional $1 billion into the state’s share of financing for public schools, kindergarten through high school. His gesture earned him continued support, for now at least, from state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, with whom Deukmejian battled so bitterly last year over state aid to the schools. The Administration boasts that the new school money sets a record for per-pupil spending. But in fact the $3,552 level of aid is only $4 higher than it was two years ago, and it remains lower than that of most other large, wealthy states.

Give the governor credit, too, for proposing $1.6 billion in bond money for new school construction, but there is little choice if California is to adequately house the influx of new pupils into the system--nearly 100,000 just during the coming year. And he keeps the state’s university systems on the path of excellence with increases of 6% to 7%.

The governor’s other major commitments are to new prisons and highway construction, including $1 billion in proposed road-building bond funds and the hiring of an additional 1,200 Caltrans employees to speed the pace of 1,500 construction projects. One billion dollars will disappear into the state’s freeway system very quickly as portions of it approach rush-hour gridlock. Regrettably, the governor did not have a word to say about the need for more mass transit.

Above all, as Deukmejian’s Finance Department described it, the governor’s 1988-89 budget keeps faith with Proposition 4, the 1979 Gann limit on state expenditures that resulted in last year’s $1.1-billion tax rebate. The governor essentially proposed in 1988-89 to spend what is available to him under this arbitrary formula that does not reflect the needs of a state of 27 million that is growing by an estimated 1,500 residents a day.

In his briefing on the budget, state Finance Director Jesse R. Huff made much of the percentage increases in major budget areas since fiscal 1982-83, the budget in effect when Deukmejian first took office. Education was up 71%, and health and welfare spending had increased by 63%, most of it mandated by state law. Outlays for prisons had soared 194%. But everything else increased only 25% in inflated dollars--which comes close to standing still for six years.

This means that there have been no major new initiatives from the Administration in the war on air pollution, for instance, or housing, long-term health care for the growing ranks of senior citizens, child care, reduction of school class sizes, reform of community colleges, parks and recreation, open-space preservation, water quality and other items. “The best is yet to come,” the governor said Wednesday night. But the budget that he revealed the next morning merely keeps up, if that. It certainly does not forge ahead.

Fiscal stability is important, of course. Deukmejian has been a rock of fiscal stability in keeping taxes low. That fact does have some allure to business, industry and taxpayers generally. But it is clear that California must do more if the state is going to compete on the world stage in the way Deukmejian envisioned it in his speech. California may have passed Great Britain as an economic power, as the governor said, but it also recently lost out in competitions where it should be strongest--for the superconducting super collider and a $1.5-billion technology research center.

There was a general sigh of relief when the Democratic-controlled Legislature saw the governor’s budget on Thursday. Not that it was so good, said Chairman John Vasconcellos of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, but that it was not as bad as it might have been. That is not the way California should measure progress.