Views on Governor’s Fiscal Legacy Vary Widely : State budget: Deukmejian anticipated criticism of his spending plan vetoes. The Legislature is unlikely to overturn them. A later effort to restore programs is seen.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. George Deukmejian’s performance as the iron-fisted manager of state finances came in for fresh reviews Wednesday as aftershocks from the heavily retrenched new state budget rippled through California.

“George Deukmejian has put California’s future on hold,” said Democratic Senate leader David A. Roberti, who has both devised compromises and jousted sharply with the Republican governor over the past 7 1/2 years.

But maverick GOP Sen. Ed Davis of Santa Clarita observed that unsettled political and economic realities are so pervasive that in recent years “no governor has left with a great legacy of being actually on top of the fiscal curve.”

Legislators and observers weighed in with assessments of Deukmejian’s legacy as a fiscal manager a day after he signed a long overdue compromise $55.7-billion state budget. At the same time, he substantially vetoed funds for education, mental health and local services.

In explaining his vetoes, Deukmejian anticipated the criticism they would bring, asserting in a prepared text: “The big spenders won’t be satisfied. They never are. But I’m proud that we have protected the interests of the average taxpayer.”

And looking ahead to what historians might say of him, the governor added: “While I inherited a budget deficit in 1983, I am leaving my successor a balanced budget, a prudent reserve and long-term structural budget reforms.”

The Legislature and the governor had agreed to many of the cuts. But after he got the budget, Deukmejian went even further with his blue-pencil vetoes. Since his brief televised remarks on Tuesday, Deukmejian has not made himself available for elaboration on the vetoes.

But gubernatorial chief of staff Michael Frost defended the spending plan, noting that the portion of the budget over which the Legislature and governor have direct control grew by 7.6% over last year’s program.

“When you look at states like New York, which only had a 2% increase in the budget, I think it is a little unfair to say that this is so much of a devastating budget,” Frost told reporters.

He insisted that from the outset Deukmejian had intended to make as “fair and even” cuts as possible to keep the state within its income, but was prevented from doing so by the insistence of Democratic budget leaders that $800 million in voter-approved Proposition 98 education money was not on the negotiating table.

“He wasn’t allowed to make these cuts fair and equitable across all the programs because one major program, (Proposition 98) representing 42% of the budget, is off limits,” Frost said.

For the time being, the Legislature is likely to uphold Deukmejian’s vetoes, as painful as they may be. Roberti and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) both predicted that any attempts by the Legislature this year to override the vetoes will fail.

“But in January, efforts will be made to restore the various programs, regardless of (whether Democrat Dianne Feinstein or Republican Pete Wilson) wins the governorship,” Brown said.

The reassessments of Deukmejian’s fiscal performance came from longtime friends and foes alike and some political observers outside of Sacramento. Few gave him a ringing endorsement.

“In terms of his legacy, he has not, unfortunately, been a leader,” said retired Legislative Analyst A. Alan Post, who worked with Deukmejian as a legislator in the 1960s and 1970s. “As governor, he stressed partisan political prejudices . . . instead of comprehensive, thoughtful, courageous attacks on the highest priority needs of the state.”

Roberti said during the Deukmejian Administration the skies have turned smoggier, schools more crowded, freeways more congested and the homeless more numerous on the streets.

“California has gone through quantum change in eight years,” he said. “George Deukmejian hasn’t changed. During the whole Deukmejian Administration, we never sat back after three or four years and made a plan for the future to move forward. That’s my quarrel.”

Republican Davis said he, too, yearns for some long-range budget planning procedure that would enable state policy makers to help make decisions beyond the current one-year budget. But he said the inherent optimism of Californians about the good health of the state’s economy may be a stumbling block.

“We are so rah-rah about California that it is difficult for us to accept the fact that there could be anything but a burgeoning economy for us. No place has that forever,” Davis said.

Assemblyman Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks, a conservative Republican who sharply disagreed with Deukmejian when the governor embraced a gasoline tax increase last summer as a means of financing the Proposition 111 transportation plan, credited Deukmejian’s prison construction program as a “solid accomplishment.”

But he charged that overall the Deukmejian fiscal legacy would be remembered as a “new era of major tax increases” and as “eight years of muddling through without any clear idea of where he wanted the state to go.”

From academia came the view of Bruce Cain, assistant director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, who said he believed Deukmejian did his best to implement his conservative principles of less government and taxation.

“I think Deukmejian would say that given how he was stuck with a Democratic Legislature and given how he had to deal with Brown and Roberti for eight years, it was about all he could do. He’s probably right,” Cain said.

Times staff writer Jerry Gillam contributed to this story.