Wilson Launches Media Campaign for School Cuts : Budget: He again blames Democrats for impasse and demands they draw a plan. State issues more IOUs.

Gov. Pete Wilson took to the airwaves Thursday to sell his case for education cuts as lawmakers tried to make sense of his budget proposal and the controller issued thousands of additional IOUs, which the state will redeem once its cash-drained treasury is replenished.

Wilson and Republican legislators said the Assembly Democrats who blocked the governor’s proposed education spending reduction must devise an alternative.

Such a plan might be ready by Sunday night, Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown suggested. Although it will call for a far smaller education cut than Wilson wants, Brown said the budget would include the politically risky idea of suspending Proposition 98, the voter-approved constitutional amendment that protects school funding.

Adding to the difficulties, the Commission on State Finance reported that a jump in the state’s unemployment rate from 8.7% to 9.5% signaled continued stagnation of California’s economy. The commission said the state could lose another $2 billion in revenue over the next 12 months if a recovery does not begin soon.

“We’re in a helluva mess,” Senate Majority Leader Barry Keene (D-Ukiah) said.

Wilson spent the day in Los Angeles, shuttling among television studios and newspaper editorial boards in an effort to make his case that the budget cannot be balanced without cutting $2 billion from the $25 billion that public schools and community colleges were expecting to receive for the 1992-93 academic year.

“The message is much easier to understand unfiltered by the Capitol press corps,” said Dan Schnur, the governor’s top spokesman.

Schnur said Wilson was keeping tabs on the budget situation and would be “on the first plane back” to Sacramento if the Democrats show a willingness to “talk realistically” about the budget.

But Assembly Speaker Brown said Wilson’s time would be better spent meeting with legislators than with television interviewers.

He added: “The governor is out of touch. I suppose if I owned a television I could see him.”

The Administration, for the most part, refused requests from the press and legislative aides to help explain the impact of the 510-page budget proposal Wilson released Wednesday--the first day of the fiscal year and two weeks after the Legislature’s deadline for passing a spending plan.

In several cases, top Administration officials contacted by The Times said they did not know what was in the budget or how it would work.

Chris Crystal, spokeswoman for the Health and Welfare Agency, said she did not know which of the giant agency’s programs would be cut. Asked if the agency had participated in drafting the plan, Crystal replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”

But legislative staffers studying the document reported that it called for a $200-million “unallocated” reduction to be distributed later among various programs. They also said the spending plan would be unworkable without additional measures to change state law. Wilson used the same two criticisms to shoot down a plan offered by Democrats earlier this year.

Legislative aides said the Wilson plan included his earlier proposals to cut by as much as 25% grants to poor women with children and to eliminate dental care and other health services that Medi-Cal now provides but are not among services that the federal government requires the state to offer.

Among the other cuts cited by legislative staff:

* Reduced funding for poison control centers, AIDS education and drugs.

* Elimination of a program that helps homeless people pay the upfront money required to rent an apartment.

* A sizable cut in a program that provides in-home assistance to keep the elderly out of nursing homes.

* Reduced support for the state licensing of day-care homes.

* Elimination of parole for up to 40,000 nonviolent offenders and extension of good-time credits to more inmates, which would shorten their sentences.

Wilson also proposed expanding several “preventive government” programs that he created a year ago but that the Legislature had proposed to freeze for one year. The programs are designed to provide people with early education and health treatment to head off the need for more expensive social programs later in life.

But the major battleground continued to be the education budget, which Wilson wants to reduce slightly even as nearly 200,000 more students are expected to enter the public schools system this year.

Leaders of the Education Coalition of California, in a Los Angeles news conference Thursday, said the governor’s proposed school spending cuts would result in a large number of school districts going into bankruptcy or state receivership.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which just slashed $400 million from its $3.8-billion budget, would lose another $230 million under the Wilson plan, said Juan Perez of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

The Democrats’ most recent alternative, which Wilson rejected, proposed increasing the schools budget statewide by about $1.3 billion, enough to keep up with enrollment and provide less than 2% extra for inflation or new programs. This amounts to a $605 million cut from what schools were expected to receive in the new year.

Brown said Thursday that the Democrats do not intend to cut any deeper into education than they already have proposed. But he said even that $605-million reduction probably would require lawmakers to suspend Proposition 98, which many legislators from both parties have pledged they would not do.

“It has to happen,” Brown said of the Proposition 98 suspension.

Brown and Senate Leader David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) said the budget committees in each house would meet today and over the weekend, if necessary, to incorporate some of Wilson’s cuts and propose some one-time savings to balance the budget.

Both said they did not intend to propose raising taxes or rolling over part of the deficit into the next fiscal year.

Late Thursday, state Controller Gray Davis prepared to issue IOUs to 5,943 government workers awaiting payment for hourly wages earned in June. These are “temporary intermittent” employees, with variable hours.

Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this story.

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