County Gets Little Sympathy in Sacramento : Budget: L.A.-area officials are snubbed by legislators who say their trip to the Capitol comes too late. Supervisors say they don’t want a handout, but need help in raising taxes.

An entourage of Los Angeles County supervisors and top officials descended on the state Capitol with hat in hand Monday, pleading for a way out of the county’s worst fiscal crisis in memory, but their appeals went unanswered.

Faced with a $1.2-billion budget deficit that threatens to trigger deep cuts in county services, some of the most powerful local officials in the state spent a remarkable day roaming the halls of the Legislature in a desperate search for dollars.

Arriving in the Capitol as negotiations on a new state budget were nearing an end, the supervisors rushed from meeting to meeting the next--and from one corner of the ornate Assembly floor to the other--in personal appeals for help. Between 8:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m., they met with nearly everybody who would listen, including Gov. Pete Wilson at an evening audience.

But they failed to make much headway, especially on obtaining state assistance to avert threatened cuts in programs from health and welfare to parks, libraries and law enforcement.

On the Assembly floor, Supervisor Deane Dana glumly assessed their progress: “It doesn’t look very good.

“Both sides seem to have made up their mind that they don’t intend to help out L.A. County. It’s very sad,” Dana said. “We have so many representatives up here, but they don’t seem to be receptive.”

Things got worse later in the day, and then better--but not by much.

Only freshman Republican Assemblyman Steve T. Kuykendall of Rancho Palos Verdes showed up at a late afternoon session that was to have included all GOP lawmakers from Los Angeles County.

“This was a delegation meeting and I hope this is not representative of your party’s level of interest,” Supervisor Gloria Molina told Kuykendall. “We are coming here desperate.”

As he sat in an ornate Capitol meeting room, Kuykendall was vastly outnumbered by the local contingent: Dana, Molina, fellow supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, Chief Administrative Officer Sally Reed and other top county officials.

Molina, chairwoman of the board, delayed the start of the session in hopes of a larger turnout. Then she gave up and started anyway.

And when three other GOP members straggled in near the end of the meeting, they were not inclined to offer financial aid to the supervisors, citing their own wrangling over an already overdue state budget. “It’s kind of late,” said Assemblyman William J. (Pete) Knight (R-Palmdale). “You should have been here a long time ago.”

In a mantra repeated throughout the day, Yaroslavsky told the Republicans the county doesn’t want to ask state lawmakers to raise taxes. It only wants the freedom to raise revenues itself, including imposing a 10% tippler’s tax on alcoholic beverages, a tobacco tax, a countywide business and utility tax and quarter-cent sales tax, he said.

“We’re not asking for a handout. . . . We’re asking you to let us pay the political price for raising taxes,” Yaroslavsky told the Republicans. “ . . . And then we’re put on a wild goose chase up here.”

Even the Democrats--usually more attuned to the county’s needs--were openly skeptical about the supervisors’ lobbying efforts meeting with any success.

Several Los Angeles-area legislators said the high-level lobbying blitz came too late, with legislative leaders and Wilson already hammering out the final elements of a new state budget for the fiscal year that began 10 days earlier.

“I think we’re going to have a budget this week and this is the first time they are up here,” said one Democrat. “That’s not the way to create an urgency for their cause. It’s a mistake that they didn’t come sooner.”

Added Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman (D-Los Angeles) diplomatically, “Obviously we wish this kind of meeting could have happened sooner.”

“We’ve been here,” responded Molina. “We’ve had lobbyists here, we’ve met with their staff. . . . I don’t know what kind of invitation they need.”

Each carrying a gray folder with personal marching orders, the supervisors warned all who would listen that the financially strapped county government will have no choice but to make catastrophic and sweeping reductions in social programs unless Sacramento provides immediate help.

But while Los Angeles County officials seek a state bailout, the Republican governor, who is running for President, is pressing ahead with his plan to cut bank, corporation, and income taxes by 15% over the next three years. As legislators milled about during state budget discussions, Dana and an aide sidled up to Assembly Republican Leader Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga and began their pitch. “I’ve been arguing vehemently against any cut to the counties,” Brulte said, shrugging.

After exchanging pleasantries with Dana, Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) wandered off before a word of the budget could be spoken.

To balance the state budget, Wilson and lawmakers have been diverting increasing amounts of property tax money away from counties to the state treasury.

The shift has cost Los Angeles County at least $1 billion in revenue during the past three years alone.

While Sacramento is in a tax-cutting mood, the supervisors sought authority to impose a new 10% tippler’s tax on every alcoholic drink sold in the county to help keep one of the nation’s biggest hospitals, County-USC Medical Center, from closing its doors.

It is a major uphill fight to overcome a reluctant Legislature, governor and powerful liquor lobby.

Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), author of the tippler’s tax bill, told county officials he was fighting for them, trying desperately to put help for the county on the table as part of the budget negotiations. “But,” he told several of them on the Assembly floor, “we’re getting no support whatsoever.”

During the long day, the supervisors were forced to dance an awkward minuet with each other, making sure no more than two of them were in a meeting at once, or risk violating state open-meeting laws that prohibit a majority of the board from meeting privately. “In and out,” Dana said. “It’s a pain in the neck.”

Besides the no-show meeting with the Republicans, the supervisors met together in public another time, in an evening meeting with the Democratic caucus from Los Angeles County. This time, more than half of the 25 members of the delegation showed up, but the press was kicked out for most of it to allow what one lawmaker called “a frank and open discussion” of proposals.

That meant the supervisors once again had to split up, with Yaroslavsky waiting until Burke came out before going in, like political tag-team wrestling match.

That meeting, the supervisors said, was the most optimistic one of the day, with some county-area Democrats pledging to help the county in whatever way they could.

“It was a very frank discussion, an open discussion, which is just what we need at this time of the crisis,” said Reed, as she left that meeting to meet down the hall with the governor.

Supervisors--Yaroslavsky and Dana, along with Reed, met with Wilson in the evening to describe the depth of the county’s budget crisis and the possibility of massive cuts in services and county jobs if help is not forthcoming.

Yaroslavsky said they gave the governor and his budget chief “a very graphic depiction” of the effect on the county’s financial condition if Sacramento fails to provide assistance.

Dana described the lobbying effort as unprecedented in his 15-year tenure on the board. “We’ve never has a problem like this before,” he said. “When you’re facing bankruptcy, it’s pretty drastic.”

Sacramento was not the only front where county officials targeted their lobbying efforts. They also have been contacting the Clinton White House and prominent members of Congress, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), seeking their help in unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for health services.

By day’s end, the entourage was weary, but determined to press on all week, if necessary. Supervisor Mike Antonovich was due to join his colleagues today.

“It’s going to be an incredibly difficult struggle,” Garcetti said. “No one wants to talk about raising revenue, because that is a nice way of saying raising taxes.”

Undersheriff Jerry L. Harper, who came representing Sheriff Sherman Block, was less euphemistic: “I’m not real optimistic about what I’ve seen and heard today.”

State lawmakers remained skeptical as to whether the fiscal crisis is as bad as the supervisors claim. The state legislative analyst’s office, in fact, has sent budget specialists to Los Angeles to review the county’s finances to see if the projected deficit is really in excess of $1 billion, after the $257 million in cuts the supervisors made last month.