Partisan Budget Battle Avoided : Finances: Key Senate committee preserves uneasy truce. Compromise shifts money to health, education and welfare.

Poised on the brink of partisan warfare over the state budget, a key Senate committee pulled back Thursday and instead took another solid step toward crafting consensus on a spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

The Senate Budget Committee, on a 7-2 bipartisan vote, set tentative spending limits for each of four subcommittees that have domain over education, health and welfare, prisons and the state bureaucracy.

The action preserved an uneasy truce among Senate Democrats and Republicans as they try to draft a budget more realistic than past efforts, which have won sufficient support from Democrats to pass in committee but failed in the full Senate for lack of votes from Republicans.

That bipartisan goodwill, however, nearly evaporated Thursday.

Democrats arrived at the hearing on the offensive, seeking to push the overall spending cap $1 billion above what Republicans said they could live with. Had it succeeded, the Democratic move probably would have led to a series of partisan votes--and stalemate--as the four subcommittees draft their parts of the overall spending plan.

But the Republicans, unified in their opposition, were joined by two Democrats, enough to stymie the effort to inflate the spending ceilings.

After a bit of parliamentary skirmishing, four Republicans, two Democrats and an independent agreed to a compromise that kept the lower spending cap but shifted more money to health, education and welfare programs at the expense of other services.

“This sounds like a reasonable proposal,” said the committee’s veteran chairman, Democratic Sen. Alfred D. Alquist of San Jose.

The next step is for each of the four subcommittees to prioritize the programs under their control and determine how many can be funded with the money the full committee has agreed will be available. That product will return to the full committee, which probably will adjust it before sending it to the Senate floor.

The Assembly’s budget committee is undertaking a similar exercise. The two houses are required by the state Constitution to pass a budget by June 15, a deadline that is often missed because partisan disputes prevent lawmakers from amassing the two-thirds vote needed to pass a budget. Last year, the budget was not enacted until Sept. 2.

As drafted Thursday, the Senate spending limits call for an overall reduction of about 10% from the funding levels provided in current law and state policy. The committee voted to direct more of that reduction to prisons, parks, agriculture and the state’s administrative bureaucracy in order to ease the pain to health, welfare and education.

Kindergarten through 12th grade education was spared altogether because it is covered by a separate agreement that calls for spending to remain at its current level of about $4,200 per student.

If the spending limits hold, the Senate’s version of the budget would be roughly $1 billion smaller than the $37.3-billion general fund spending plan Gov. Pete Wilson proposed in January.

Republican Sen. Frank Hill of Whittier, who brokered Thursday’s compromise, said it was important to keep alive the hope that rank-and-file members of the Legislature can fashion a budget without deferring all the major decisions to private meetings among the legislative leaders and Wilson--a process that failed last year.

“This gets more people involved,” Hill said. “To the extent that you get more members involved in all these bad decisions, it becomes easier to come up with a solution.”

Steve Olsen, Wilson’s deputy director of finance, said he was encouraged by the Senate committee’s progress, even if the panel is weeks away from approving a full budget.

“They have focused the discussion on policy,” Olsen said. “What we have had in the past is more a debate over numbers and accounting than a debate over spending priorities.”