From the Mighty to the Minuscule, Davis’ Budget Has It All

In releasing his third budget last week, Gov. Gray Davis reaffirmed his commitment to perennial favorites such as education, the environment and health care.

But a close review of Davis’ $104.7-billion blueprint for state spending reveals a commitment to a variety of other issues, such as bringing bad veterinarians to justice, providing private eyes with picture IDs and digitizing historic state photos dating to the 1840s.

The proposals are among hundreds buried within the pages of the voluminous document that details how Davis wants to spend the state’s money. And they offer a glimpse at what it takes to run the world’s sixth largest economy.

In addition to setting aside an extra $60,000 to pay for the ID cards, Davis wants to spend $157,000 to begin digitizing the California State Library’s collection of photographs that document the state’s history, focusing first on 15,000 snapshots of Southern California. He also has proposed giving the state’s Veterinary Medical Board a $75,000 boost to pay for expert witnesses.

The board officials could use the money to hire a dog ophthalmologist to determine whether one of man’s best friends has been the victim of a botched eye surgery.

“We need board-certified veterinarians to tell us what is appropriate treatment and where was the deviation from standard practice,” said Gina Bayless of the veterinary board. “Without the support of an expert witness we can’t go forward with a case.”

Some spending proposals are easy to comprehend: a $7-million item to help law enforcement agencies cover the cost of collecting data on the race of drivers stopped by officers.

Others are enigmas: a $340,000 proposal for the Department of Motor Vehicles to fund “the enterprise alternative procurement for independent project oversight of the legacy data processing replacement project.” In plain English, it means the planning stages to replace the department’s mainframe computer.

When he unveiled the budget, Davis characterized his spending plan as both “responsive and responsible.” Armed with a multibillion-dollar surplus, the Democratic governor wants to bolster state spending on public schools by $3.2 billion over last year, set aside $1.9 billion in an emergency reserve and use $1 billion to help resolve the state’s energy crisis.

State Sen. Tom McClintock, the penny-pinching Republican from Northridge, had a different take on the phone-book-sized plan. “It is responsive to the spending lobby,” McClintock said.

There is the $15.1 million it is estimated to cost the DMV during a two-year period for its role in administering a car tax rebate approved by the Legislature last year. Rather than simply sending vehicle owners a bill reflecting a lower fee, Davis demanded that owners send in their payments as usual and then receive a rebate check a month or so later.

It’s Davis’ belief that people don’t realize they are getting a rebate unless they have a check to show for it. In addition to the $15.1 million in DMV expenses, the budget estimates it will cost state Controller Kathleen Connell’s office $10.5 million to issue the checks.

In her initial review of the Davis spending plan, nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill concluded that it funds most existing state programs, but a number of the governor’s new proposals will need to be better developed.

Davis’ $100-million idea to extend the school year for the state’s middle school students by six weeks lacks data justifying the approach and fails to detail how it would be implemented, Hill’s office said.

In addition, the spending plan does not include money for potential increases in employee pay, overstates local property tax revenues available to public school by up to $150 million and under-funds by $60 million the child-care needs of former recipients of CalWORKS, the welfare-to-work program.

The upper and lower houses of the Legislature will issue their own versions of the budget. Davis will release a revised budget in May, when the number of proposals he has suggested could grow, depending on the amount of revenue generated from state income tax returns due in April.

“The big question when it comes to the budget is how much money do we really have here?” said Dan Carson of the legislative analyst’s office. “The truth is nobody will have a firm handle on that until we open the checks in April.”

The budget must receive the stamp of approval from the Legislature and be signed by Davis to take effect July 1. Between now and then, plenty of wrangling will take place at the Capitol.

With this budget, Davis appears to have avoided reigniting a controversy over how the state should spend the $468 million that California stands to receive in 2001-02 from the 1998 settlement of the national tobacco litigation.

Davis balked last year at a push by physicians and anti-tobacco advocates that he earmark the settlement funds for health care and to combat tobacco use. Last week, however, the governor agreed to spend all of this year’s settlement money on health programs.

He outlined a $201.5-million expansion of the Healthy Families program to cover thousands of parents of children either enrolled in Healthy Families or, in certain cases, the Medi-Cal program. The amount includes $76.1 million in tobacco settlement funds and $115 million in federal funds.

Enrollment in the program for low-income children has failed to meet expectations in California, putting federal funding at risk. The problem gave rise to the proposal, which is awaiting approval of federal officials, to begin covering parents, a change that observers believe will bolster child enrollment.

“The program is going to be more appealing because it is whole family coverage,” said Jim Keddy of the Pacific Institute for Community Organization, which has pushed for parental coverage. “Healthy Families is gaining momentum already. This will help increase that momentum.”

Davis’ budget estimates that 174,000 low-income, uninsured adults will participate in the program by June 30, 2002, bringing the total enrollment of the Healthy Families program to 735,000 by that date.

Other odds and ends include:

* $100,000 for an assessment of exposures and risk of consumption of chromium 6 in drinking water from the San Fernando Basin aquifer.

* $5.2 million to perform rape kit DNA analyses and $1.4 million to test DNA samples of felons.

* A $577,000 savings triggered by a reduction in paper tax returns due to an increase in the number of electronically filed returns.