Senate Sustains Wilson’s Veto of Democrats’ Education Bill : Finances: An override attempt falls six votes short. The governor says the measure calls for spending more money than the state can afford.

The state Senate on Monday sustained Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of a Democrat-backed education finance bill that would have given the schools more money than Wilson says the state can afford.

The veto override attempt fell six votes short of the 27, or two-thirds of the house, required to overturn the governor’s rejection.

Wilson vetoed the education measure eight minutes after it arrived on his desk late Sunday night, issuing a sharply worded veto message he penned himself as the bill was moving through the Legislature over the weekend.

“A vote for this bill is clearly a breach of faith with the people and the taxpayers of California,” Wilson wrote.

The governor said any additional money for schools beyond what he has proposed would require deeper cuts in universities or health and welfare programs or in local government, which Wilson says would force reductions in police and fire services.

The vetoed bill would have given schools virtually the same amount per student in the coming year as they spent last year. Wilson has proposed the same amount for kindergarten through 12th-grade schools but would require those schools to borrow from the future to keep even this year and would cut deeper into community colleges than the Democrats have agreed to.

“California faces the hardest economic times since the Great Depression of the 1930s--a period of such sharp drops in revenues as to compel spending cuts in almost every other area of state services, except education from kindergarten through high school,” Wilson wrote.

The next major action on the budget is expected to happen in the Senate, where President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) and Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno interrupted their negotiations Sunday and Monday to allow the Senate to vote on the Assembly education bill.

The emerging Senate deal, as it has been described by Roberti and Maddy, would include several Democratic concessions to Wilson, including deeper cuts in welfare, Medi-Cal and education than Democrats have agreed to so far.

“Willie Brown and the Assembly Democrats threw up a roadblock,” said Dan Schnur, Wilson’s chief spokesman. “They succeeded in delaying progress for a couple of days. Now it’s back to work.”

The education bill was drafted in the Assembly and fit into Assembly Speaker Brown’s proposed budget, which also would cut local government more than Wilson has agreed to and is balanced in part by shifting a month’s worth of Medi-Cal bills from the end of one fiscal year to the beginning of the next.

“I guess we’re back to square one,” Brown said in an interview after the veto.

The Speaker said he will continue to negotiate with Republicans in the Assembly in hopes of cobbling together a budget that can get the votes of the eight to 10 GOP lawmakers needed to pass a spending plan. The budget needs 54 votes for passage, and there are 47 Democrats and 33 Republicans in the Assembly.

Brown said he agreed Monday to a slightly deeper cut in welfare grants than he had previously accepted. Rather than a one-year, 4.5% cut in grants, he said, he now is willing to accept a three-year reduction. The first year cut would be deeper, about 6%, to produce the same savings that would have resulted had the 4.5% cut been in effect for the entire fiscal year, which began July 1.

Republican Assemblywoman Cathie Wright of Simi Valley, the Assembly GOP’s lead budget negotiator, confirmed that she is nearing agreement on the welfare bill with Assembly Democrats. But Wright said she may push for a cut that would last longer than three years.

Times staff writers Jerry Gillam and Carl Ingram contributed to this story.