GOVERNER : Wilson Says Feinstein Will Hike Taxes, Declines to Say He Won’t

Sen. Pete Wilson tried to hang the “tax-and-spend” label on Democrat Dianne Feinstein Tuesday while saying he would not consider raising taxes until California’s spending priorities had been reexamined and perhaps changed.

“Her reaction to problems (as mayor of San Francisco) was to tax and spend,” Wilson, the Republican nominee for governor, said during campaign stops in San Diego, Fairfield and the east side of the San Francisco Bay. “Mine was to set priorities and keep them.”

Wilson refused to acknowledge that an impending state revenue shortfall would require new taxes to balance the 1991-92 budget, the first to bear the stamp of the new governor. But he said again that it would be irresponsible to pledge not to raise taxes.

Wilson declined to specify which state programs he might cut, if that was the route chosen to a balanced budget. He also refused to single out as candidates for elimination any of the programs that the state Legislature has mandated to be paid for by city and county governments.

But the senator said California’s legacy of “ballot-box budgeting,” of adopting tax-and-spend measures through the initiative process, must be changed because it is denying funding for some critical problems. He cited the care and training for the developmentally disabled as one such problem.

Asked if that would lead to more taxes, he said, “We may be looking for new revenue sources.”

But Wilson said it would be imprudent to raise taxes under the present budget structure since so much of the tax pie has been allocated by ballot initiatives.

“For every dollar you raise, you don’t get even 50 cents,” he said.

Then, asked if that might necessitate a change in Proposition 98, the 1988 initiative measure that guarantees about 40% of the state’s General Fund revenue to public education, Wilson said, “It might.”

All such matters must be a subject to negotiation at budget conferences to be held when he takes office, Wilson said.

If Wilson put off questions about how he would handle the state budget, there was no hesitation on his part in saying what Feinstein would do.

“She is a taxer and spender and I am not,” he said at a luncheon in Fairfield, a city in Solano County between San Francisco and Sacramento. A few minutes later he called Feinstein “a tireless taxer and spender.”

In both San Diego and Alameda, Wilson was greeted by a host of city and county officials who were endorsing him. To them he pledged, as he has many times, that as governor he would veto any legislation that required local government to perform some new service without providing the money to pay for that service.

Wilson said the Legislature repeatedly has broken the law requiring it to fund programs required of local government. Although many such programs were commendable ones, the fiscal strain had pushed a number of counties to “the brink of bankruptcy,” he said.

Wilson also listed more than 20 new boards, commissions and task forces he claimed Feinstein had proposed and demanded to know how she would pay for them.

“Good idea,” Wilson said as he read down the list and came to a proposal for a state Environmental Protection Agency. “It was mine.”

State Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill has said the state faces a potential deficit of $1.1 billion in the 1991-92 budget year, starting next July 1. But Wilson said there are varying estimates about the potential shortfall and that he was not ready “to second-guess that.”

When talking about the need for budget economies, Wilson added, “There isn’t anything I want to cut.”

Feinstein has said she expects the budget deficit to be anywhere from Hill’s $1.1-billion estimate to several billion dollars. She has said she would find what economies she could before considering tax increases which, if they came, probably would be in the form of higher levies on incomes of the wealthy.

But like Wilson, Feinstein has said that, if elected, she would convene a series of budget negotiations to explore reforms to relieve the problem of spending mandates dictated by ballot measures. She has promised not to reduce the education funds guaranteed by Proposition 98, however.