State Budget Talks Stall on Issue of Aid to Counties

Gov. Pete Wilson said state budget negotiations bogged down Tuesday when Democrats in the Assembly would not agree with his proposal to give county governments the broadest possible latitude to set their own levels of health and welfare services.

Wilson, emerging from a two-hour closed session with the top four legislative leaders, said he and the leaders reached agreement on higher education funding--no details were disclosed--but deadlocked on the local government issue, which is considered key to resolving the state’s 35-day-old budget crisis.

“I think it’s fair to say we have reached something of an impasse, which largely blocks further progress as it relates to local government,” Wilson told reporters.

A spokesman for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) acknowledged that Wilson and he disagreed, but noted that the leadership is scheduled to meet again today.

“That’s the nature of negotiations,” said Jim Lewis, Brown’s press secretary. “You have some give and take, you hit some rocky points, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.”

To help balance the budget, the members of the leadership quintet agree that the state’s post-Proposition 13 bailout of local governments should be at least partially repealed, resulting in the transfer this year of between $932 million and $1.7 billion from cities, counties and special districts to the state.

But the parties do not agree on how much money to take from each level of local government or whether to give cities and counties additional taxing powers to make up what they lose. They also disagree on how far the state should go to relieve the counties of their obligations to the sick and the poor--the issue on which they collided Tuesday.

Wilson said one important area of dispute was general assistance--the county-funded welfare program for people, mostly unemployed men, who do not qualify for Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Assembly Democrats have agreed to impose a residency requirement on the program to discourage people in bordering states from crossing into California to collect aid. They also have agreed to allow counties to withdraw aid from people who refuse to accept job training or look for employment, and they have agreed to impose stricter standards to assure that the citizen sponsors of legal immigrants live up to their obligation to provide for the well-being of those they bring into the country.

But Wilson said Assembly Democrats are trying to “defend something I think is indefensible”--paying more in aid to single, able-bodied men than they do to the dependent children of poor women.

Actually, the Democrats have agreed to cap general assistance payments to individuals at the same level the state now provides for a single AFDC recipient--$341 a month. The only exception would be in cases where recipients live in shared housing. In those cases, the Democrats have agreed to reduce general assistance grants but not by as much as AFDC grants are cut under the same circumstances.

Wilson wants to give county supervisors the sole discretion to set the level of general assistance grants as long as the payments do not exceed the AFDC grant level. This would allow the counties to eliminate general assistance altogether.

The counties’ representatives in Sacramento have agreed to the Democrats’ proposal. They oppose Wilson’s proposal because they fear that the major urban counties will become “magnets” for the poor if smaller, rural counties sharply reduce or eliminate their assistance grants. Wilson has been trying to persuade the counties to break with the Democrats and support his position.