Brown, Lawmakers Seek Accord Without Going Through Wilson

Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown is working with top Republicans in the Assembly and Senate to try to craft a budget deal that can win bipartisan support in the Legislature even without the cooperation of Gov. Pete Wilson.

Brown met Wednesday with Republican Sen. Frank Hill of Whittier in search of a way to erase the differences that so far have blocked agreement on a $40-billion general fund spending plan. Separately, Brown met later in the day with Assembly Republican Leader Bill Jones of Fresno and Assemblywoman Cathie Wright of Simi Valley, the Assembly Republicans’ lead member on the budget.

“I’ve given up on Pete Wilson,” Brown said.

The Speaker, in an interview with The Times, said he figures that Wilson will criticize any agreement reached in the Legislature and “whack the hell out of it” with his blue pencil, or line-item veto authority.

“He will denounce it and proceed to trash the Legislature,” Brown said. “He will lambaste us. He will complain that there’s not enough reform in it. But he could do all that and still sign it on the grounds that he wants to stop the IOUs.”

Brown’s round-robin negotiations, which also have included the education Establishment, representatives of cities and counties, and parties interested in the workers’ compensation issue, appear to represent the best hope at the moment for a break in the state’s budget deadlock, which has forced the government to go nine days into the fiscal year without a spending plan.

The public deliberations of the Assembly-Senate conference committee on the budget have yielded little progress, with the six-member panel recessing Wednesday afternoon after cutting about $300 million from a $42-billion plan that Republicans blocked in the Assembly on June 30.

Legislative leaders have not met since June 25 with the governor, who, since the fiscal year began, has embarked on a series of radio and television interviews around the state in which he has tried to win support for his position. On the major issue separating the parties--education funding--Wilson wants to cut $2 billion from the $25 billion that schools are supposed to receive next year under the guidelines of Proposition 98, the voter-approved constitutional amendment.

Brown and the Assembly Democrats have agreed to a $600-million reduction from the Proposition 98 guarantee, which actually would leave schools with a small year-to-year increase in per-student funding.

In the interview, Brown suggested that he might be willing to accept a budget that freezes per-student funding at the same level as last year, a figure an aide said would translate into a $1-billion reduction from the Proposition 98 guarantee.

“If I were in (the Republicans’) position and trying to come up with suggestions, I would go back and see what dollar figure would hold the schools harmless,” Brown said. “There has to be some growth in the amount of money schools get just to reflect the 200,000 new students. That is the figure I would look at if I was trying to show I was not trying to hurt schools.”

Hill, the Senate Republicans’ representative to the budget-writing conference committee, began meeting with Brown after publicly voicing frustration with Wilson’s refusal to accept the Democrats’ concessions at face value and negotiate from there.

“You’ve got to turn the debate away from who is the winner and who is the loser to a debate about the budget document,” Hill said.

Hill said Wednesday that he and Brown are probably “a couple billion dollars” apart.

“It sounds like a lot,” Hill said, “but not when you think of it as part of a $40-billion problem. A better way to say it is that if all parties want a budget, there are ways to get there.”