NEWS ANALYSIS : Wilson Likely to Follow 1st Term--Only More So

Pete Wilson’s second term as governor figures to be just like his first, only more so.

More welfare cuts. More criminal justice reform. More business tax breaks. More struggling to balance the budget. And perhaps more than just tinkering with the state’s massive system of public education.

Wilson often has said he left the U.S. Senate to run for governor in 1990 because he thought he could make changes. Now, with a sweeping reelection victory behind him and his party poised to seize control of the state Assembly for the first time in a generation, the governor may have the chance to make good on some of the plans that eluded him during his first four years.

Wilson made few explicit promises in the 1994 campaign, and he declined a request for an interview with The Times after the election to preview his agenda.

But a look back at the campaign and a review of the proposals Wilson has advanced since he took office in 1991 provide some solid hints of how a second Wilson term might look.

“What we intend is that there be a California of unparalleled opportunity and much greater personal responsibility,” Wilson said the morning after the election, in which he defeated Democrat Kathleen Brown by a 55% to 40% margin.

To increase opportunity, Wilson wants to cut taxes on business and perhaps on individuals. He wants to make schools more accountable and give parents more power to choose among public schools for their children. And he wants to streamline the state’s many job training programs to make them better serve those who need help entering, or re-entering, the labor force.

On the responsibility side of the ledger, Wilson will seek to expand the death penalty, further lengthen some criminal sentences and try to require all violent felons to serve 100% of their terms. He is all but certain to revive his proposal to remove poor families from the welfare rolls after two years, or perhaps less, if the head of household is able-bodied but not working.

And he will work to implement Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that denies most public services to illegal immigrants.

Less clear is to what extent Wilson will respond to the groundswell across the country and in California for paring back the role of the state in people’s lives.

Wilson, after all, has made his career in government, and during his first term he showed little inclination to slash it. He signed bills injecting more government, not less, into the affairs of individuals, including legislation requiring motorcyclists and young bicyclists to wear helmets, children to wear life vests while boating, and employers to ban smoking in their workplaces.

Although Wilson often boasted of eliminating more than 100 boards and commissions, most of the panelists were unpaid, met rarely and had the power only to advise. He resisted bipartisan efforts to eliminate entire departments or functions of state government--such as the fire marshal--that some lawmakers said were duplicative of local or federal programs.

And Wilson’s interest in privatizing government has been limited to the highway department--Caltrans--where his Administration has favored the use of private engineers to design freeways. He has not joined those who offered more radical ideas such as farming out the job of the Department of Motor Vehicles to private entrepreneurs.

Republican strategist Steven Merksamer said Wilson would do well to undertake a comprehensive examination of everything the state government does. Ironically, Democrat Brown made the same idea--she called it a “performance review”--a key part of her campaign.

In a second Wilson term, Merksamer said, “the question has to be asked, for every state agency and department in existence today, is there a rational basis for its continued existence or support? That kind of review would be well-received by the public.”

Others wonder whether Wilson has any interest in dismantling much of the government he will be running.

“I think Wilson is a managerialist politician for the most part,” said William Bradley, a Democratic political adviser and columnist who worked for Brown before parting company earlier this year. “He doesn’t strike me as a radical. He as governor has done little to downsize government or re-create it. That’s not to say that he might not have a mid-life conversion here.”

After raising taxes by $7 billion in his first year in office, Wilson turned around and opposed major tax hikes in subsequent budgets. In 1993, he managed to roll back the tax burden a bit by enacting credits for businesses that buy manufacturing equipment. Now he says he wants to do more.

He may begin by trying again to win passage of tax cuts rejected by the Legislature this year, including a modest income tax reduction for low-income families and a $1,000 tax credit for each full-time job created by start-up businesses in California.

These proposals, which would return roughly $150 million to the taxpayers, are dwarfed by the governor’s insistence that the state allow the expiration of a temporary income tax surcharge on individuals earning more than $100,000 a year and couples with incomes higher than $200,000 a year.

The higher tax rates, adopted in 1991, are scheduled to lapse at the end of 1995--at a cost to the state budget of nearly $1 billion.

If Wilson is serious about tax cuts such as these, he may have to entertain some of the ideas he was cool to in his first term. Even if reducing taxes stimulates the economy and provides more revenue to government--as Wilson argues--there is still likely to be a lag that worsens the short-term budget deficit unless he also cuts spending.

Recent statistics have shown that the economy is improving, and state tax receipts are climbing, too. But Wilson nevertheless will face a hole of roughly $2 billion when he delivers his next proposed budget on Jan. 10. His hope of closing that gap by extracting money from Washington for the cost of serving illegal immigrants is not necessarily any closer to fruition with the election of a Republican Congress bent on cutting federal spending.

One way Wilson could cut the state budget would be to revive his proposal to transform the welfare program. Although the governor’s plan was rejected by voters in 1992, the Legislature later enacted parts of it and added ideas aimed at making it easier for recipients to move from the welfare rolls to a private payroll.

The state has cut basic welfare benefits 15% since 1991, but Wilson has said he would like to lower them further. Even more, he wants to sharply reduce benefits to anyone who has been on the program for six months or more, and perhaps eliminate the monthly stipends altogether after two years.

Other than his welfare proposals, though, Wilson has advocated few major cuts in government services.

He has asked the Legislature to eliminate several services that are part of the Medi-Cal program for the poor, including dental care for adults, podiatry, chiropractic care and acupuncture. But these services represent just a small part of the state’s subsidized health care program, and Wilson has said nothing to indicate that he would want to eliminate such big-ticket items as prescription drugs or nursing home care or restrict eligibility for the program.

In the other major areas of government spending--prisons and schools--Wilson wants to spend more, not less.

His prison budget is expected to soar with the implementation of the “three strikes” sentencing law. But another perhaps more expensive proposition has gotten much less attention: the idea of reducing or eliminating the credits for good behavior that have allowed prison inmates to cut their terms in half.

Wilson won a partial victory on this front in 1994, reducing to just 15% the amount of time violent or serious felons can shave from their sentences. Next year, he said, he will try to wipe out the credits altogether for violent felons.

The governor also has taken something of a pledge not to cut the other big-ticket state government item: education. After being portrayed early on as anti-education, Wilson has said he would not reduce funding below the current level of about $4,200 per pupil. As enrollments grow, fulfilling that promise will cost the state several hundred million dollars per year.

Wilson might want to use those budget increases to extract policy changes from the education Establishment, a task that may be easier now that the California Teachers Assn. has seen its Democratic partners lose power in the Assembly, where Speaker Willie Brown was a staunch ally.

Wilson opposed the 1993 ballot measure that would have given parents taxpayer-paid vouchers to use in any public or private schools. But Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s secretary for education and child development, said the governor probably will push for expanding the number of chartered public schools, where teachers and parents create new programs free from almost all state regulation.

The governor may also revive his interest in merit pay for teachers and his desire to give local districts more leeway to spend money now restricted to various special programs, known as categoricals.

Wilson said last week that he intends to pay “a great deal of attention” to education.

“It is essential that our kids be in a position where in fact they are prepared for the job market and prepared to be the kind of citizens that they really ought to be,” Wilson said.

The schools also will be the major battleground over the implementation of Proposition 187, which the governor has pledged to defend with vigor. Wilson’s aggressive attack on the federal government over the issue was a turning point in his comeback from near political oblivion, and white voters supported him in droves Nov. 8.

Some say Wilson must now reach out to Latinos, who vote in small numbers today but are an increasingly large share of the state’s population and may one day represent a larger portion of voters. Wilson won 35% of the Latino vote in 1990 but 22% this year.

“He really has to make some peace with the Hispanic population,” said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Center for the New West. “If the Republicans don’t staunch the hemorrhage of the Latino electorate, they are going to pay for it in the long run.”