Let’s Have Leadership, Let’s Have a State Budget

California is now more than two weeks into the 1997-98 fiscal year without a state budget, welfare reform, fiscal relief for local governments, a formula for spending new state school money and much more. And without any real political leadership, so far as anyone can tell.

Californians, including most members of the Legislature, have no sense of which issues may be holding up a budget resolution or how long the stalemate between Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and the Democrat-controlled Legislature may continue.

No one knows because the negotiations over all these issues are being conducted in private by the so-called Big Five: the governor, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and Assembly and the GOP leaders of the two houses.

This sort of back-room deal-making is bad policy. Worse yet, these talks involve far more than the usual budget decisions on how much to spend on this item or that one. With welfare and other key issues in the balance, the Big Five are deciding public policy that will affect the course of state government for years to come.

When each meeting is concluded, the leaders emerge to make bland assurances about progress. There are no details, presumably because the talks are so delicate. Or perhaps because members of the Big Five don’t want some special interest to know that its cause is being sold out.

State leaders indicate there is no rush because the lack of a budget is not really hurting anyone, that most state services continue as they did last June 30, the final day of the old budget. But that is not quite so. State Controller Kathleen Connell reported Tuesday that the state already is more than $1 billion in arrears, including payments to small business contractors, who have debts and mortgages of their own coming due.

There have been suggestions that one side or the other may be deliberately prolonging the budget and welfare talks for its own political advantage. If so, that is a dangerous, no-win strategy. After the marathon stalemate of 1992, which lasted into September, the public popularity of both the Legislature and Wilson plummeted. The best thing for the governor, the Legislature and the 32 million people of California is to have this budget impasse ended as soon as possible.