The Serious Season Is Yet to Arrive : Wilson’s May revisions play games with the state budget

‘Tis the election season and Gov. Pete Wilson is playing political games with the state budget. Wilson himself has tacitly recognized this in admitting that the May revisions of his proposed 1994-95 budget will have to be redone after the June 7 primary to reflect a “realistic assessment” of his expectation that the federal government will reimburse California $3.1 billion for immigration services.

The federal government should indeed reimburse California for much of the money the state spends on services for immigrants, and the governor is right to seek federal repayment for state education, health and incarceration costs for undocumented immigrants. However, White House officials maintain that Wilson is overstating the problem by inflating the number of illegal immigrants in California. They also emphasize it is Congress, rather than the Administration, that must be persuaded to support President Clinton’s effort to help states deal with the problems of illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, the $3.1 billion--a figure that Wilson first presented in January--is just not in the cards, so there’s no point in counting on it for the state budget.

There is a fine line between Wilson’s legitimate bashing of Washington and socially divisive immigrant-bashing. He has crossed that line a few times, most recently in some of his reelection campaign’s television commercials that seem to blame illegal immigrants for all of California’s recent problems.

Wilson also embraced another politically charged issue in the budget. In issuing his May revisions last Friday, Wilson deleted the $26.4 million that had been designated for the new controversial state testing program known as the California Learning Assessment System. A small but vocal group of special interests has managed to exploit real but fixable problems in the testing and scoring procedures in an effort to turn those into a referendum on the new, academically rigorous tests.

Wilson says the money will be set aside until the Legislature can agree on a satisfactory bill to overhaul the test. By holding the tests hostage to funding, Wilson may appeal to noisy critics but he further undermines CLAS, which is designed to cultivate and measure critical thinking skills of children. Yes, fix the problems. But what CLAS needs is a tuneup--not an overhaul.

Lost amid all the political posturing is what the legislative analyst’s office calls the most important policy proposal in the Wilson budget: his plan to realign the state and county responsibilities and fiscal relationship. Wilson has proposed increasing county revenues by $3.2 billion in exchange for the counties assuming responsibilities for certain health and welfare programs and to provide greater county administrative flexibility.

The idea is to give counties a significant cost share in some programs they administer so that they will become more efficient and effective. However, there are big questions whether the proposal is as fiscally neutral as Wilson maintains--that is, whether counties can handle such a realignment and what changes should be made by the Legislature to enact such a restructuring. This is a fundamentally important issue that merits serious further discussion.

The governor’s May revisions traditionally kick off the first serious discussion of the budget in Sacramento. Sadly, not in this political year.