If It’s a Crisis, How Come Nothing’s Changed?

Wander through the Capitol and there is surprisingly little sense of crisis here. The soothing drone of clerks reading off bills can be heard in the Assembly and the Senate.

Angry citizens are not filling the galleries. No one’s staging a sit-in at the governor’s office. Large crowds are not gathering outside the west entrance to give voice to protest.

The state may be entering its 27th day without a budget, but calm prevails.

And there is good reason for the subdued, almost invisible response to the fiscal emergency--it has had no immediate impact on state government.

If you need to renew your driver’s license, the Department of Motor Vehicles remains open. If you want to file a complaint against your contractor, Department of Consumer Affairs employees are there to take your call. Prison guards continue to stand watch over felons; Highway Patrol officers cruise the state’s freeways; Caltrans crews work on the roads.

And, so far, all 274,000 employees have been paid, many with IOUs. Banks and credit unions have been willing, if not happy, to cash them just like regular checks.

You might ask, why it is that government offices remain open when Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature cannot agree on a spending plan and when there has been no authorization for the state to spend money since July 1?

The question is even more perplexing if you remember what has happened at the federal level when the President and Congress failed to reach agreement on deadline and government entered a new fiscal year without a budget. In three different years, President Ronald Reagan ordered nonessential workers to go home. Doors were locked at government offices, the Washington Monument and Statue of Liberty were closed to tourists, and even low-level White House employees were told to take the day off.

But no such threats have come from Wilson. And government continues to run as if on autopilot.

How come?

“Every new Administration asks that question,” said David J. Tirapelle, Wilson’s director of personnel administration. “I think if we could do it (send employees home and close government offices), we may have had a budget long ago.”

The short and simple answer, according to Tirapelle, is that “the federal government has the authority to furlough employees, but we don’t.”

Tirapelle recalled that during state budget standoffs in the late 1970s, then-state Controller Ken Cory sent out notices to state employees warning that, as the state’s paymaster, he had no authority to pay them.

But that has changed as a result of court decisions and new state law.

In 1983, the Legislature approved a measure that authorizes payment of wages to public employees in the absence of a budget. A 1990 federal court decision went further, requiring prompt payment for Caltrans workers who remained on the job until the budget was signed. That year there was no budget for 31 days into the new fiscal year, a record delay that still stands--by four days.

Current Controller Gray Davis said he believes he has no discretion--that he must meet the state payroll, using IOUs when there is not enough cash on hand.

He agreed that “the governor does not have the authority to terminate employment” unless Wilson is willing to initiate layoffs.

But the governor can do that only if he gives 30-day notice to those workers he wants to remove. And under state Civil Service rules, that would only be the beginning. Senior employees whose jobs were eliminated would be able to bump junior workers, who in turn could bump employees with less seniority.

Davis said that layoff procedures are so complicated that it could take six to nine months to implement them.

“It would be an administrative nightmare,” Tirapelle said.

And even if it was possible to shut down state government, would Wilson or any other governor be prepared to do so? No chief executive would consider closing down prisons or mental hospitals. He would have to pick and choose carefully, said A. Alan Post, who served as the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst for more than 27 years.

And shutting down government “would be a very significant political decision on (Wilson’s) part,” Post said. “The idea that the state of California has physically collapsed would be a blemish on his ability to govern. I think if he took that action, he would pay a heavy political price in the future.”

Instead, government will continue operating until there is a budget or banks stop accepting the state’s IOUs--something the major banks say they will do starting next month. Once they refuse to cash paychecks, “the employees will revolt,” Post said. “And things would simply grind to halt.”