Pleas Make Crisis Personal

For those Californians who can’t afford $1,000 tickets to their state lawmakers’ seafood smorgasbords or Mardi Gras-themed fund-raisers, there are the old tools of democracy: letters, phone calls and faxes -- and not-so-old e-mails.

By the thousands each day, ordinary Californians try to influence the 120 legislators and one governor who are weighing deep budget cuts and new taxes to cover one of the worst state budget shortfalls in the nation.

The concern reaches the Capitol in ways both heart-wrenching and impassive, from the hand-written letter with a photo from the mother of a 10-year-old mentally disabled girl to the ready-made, anti-tax e-mails sent in bulk to every legislator.

Several lawmakers agreed to share their correspondence last week, to give The Times a glimpse of how Californians are reacting to the budget crunch.

The correspondence comes in waves and themes, depending on which program lies below the cleaver and how well Capitol lobbyists can mobilize the teachers, mayors, podiatrists or winery owners who might be put at risk by the latest moves in Sacramento.

One day, Assemblyman Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) got 6,000 e-mails opposing an increase in the annual fee to register a car or truck.

In the office of Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a former teacher and the chairwoman of the Education Committee, hundreds of letters arrived on a single day opposing cuts to the regional schools that teach trades.

On another day, 649 letters arrived, nearly all of them about another issue: the governor’s proposal to shift property tax revenues from 50 rich school districts to poorer schools in the same county.

“I will dutifully pay more than my fair share of income taxes,” wrote one father from Hillsborough, an affluent town outside San Francisco. “But if you mess with my kids’ school, you will create a lifelong and highly motivated adversary.”

In the truckloads of mail sorted in the Capitol basement, such threats are outnumbered by the pleadings of some of California’s most helpless people. Students, sick people and the elderly seem bound to lose, as the Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis wrestle with a budget shortfall estimated at $26 billion to $35 billion over the next 17 months. That’s because more than 70% of California’s total revenue -- $96 billion this year -- is spent on education, health and social services.

“I’m asking you to protect funding for long-term care,” reads one letter scrawled in shaky handwriting by a nursing home resident. Her four-line letter repeated several words, including her signature.

The correspondence varies by lawmaker too. LaMalfa, a newly elected rice farmer from the Sacramento Valley, tallied 19 e-mails and 25 letters on Wednesday. “PLEASE don’t cut any money from education!!!!” read one from a Willows schoolteacher.

Meanwhile, Assemblywoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), a member of both the Budget and Health committees, received 164 letters about Davis’ proposal to reduce state payments to nursing homes by 10%.

“Please reconsider your decision on cutting our budget,” wrote a nursing home worker named Claudia. “We do so much for the little amount of money that you pay us.”

In the office of Assemblyman Keith Richman (R-Northridge), 20 letters arrived Wednesday. The day started with an 8 a.m. fund-raiser and ended with a 6:30 p.m. dinner with Assemblyman Tom Harman (R-Huntington Beach).

In between, Richman discussed Medi-Cal cuts with a nonprofit health-care provider, reviewed energy legislation, gave the keynote speech at a California Psychological Assn. luncheon, spoke at a UCLA Center for Health Policy reception and met with representatives of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, among other appointments.

One of the letters waiting for him came from a Valencia mother. She urged Richman to fight cuts to state programs for mentally disabled children, such as the 21 regional centers that provide family support, counseling and teaching.

“The services my daughter receives help to give her the feeling of being independent, alive and a part of the larger community,” the mother wrote. “So many children at her age (age 10) have all types of sports and hobbies available to them. The very few sports and hobbies offered by specialists are so expensive, and would be unobtainable.... She has a mind that loves and understands the world around her. How could we cut her off from all that if we just let her do nothing but watch TV and videos all day?”

At the other end of the correspondence spectrum, lacking poignancy but carrying some punch, are campaigns that flood Capitol offices with hundreds of e-mails and faxes.

One morning last week, the staff of Sen. Bob Margett (R-Arcadia) arrived to find hundreds of pages of identical letters that had come in overnight until the paper supply was exhausted. When the paper was restocked, the fax machine spent two hours spitting out a backlog of letters -- each from a labor group that included a name but no signature and no return address.

“We love to hear from our constituents,” said Margett’s chief of staff, Jody Day, “but on these e-mails, there was no address for us to send a response.”

Assemblyman Joseph Simitian (D-Palo Alto) said he would rather hear the merits of an argument than count noses. But “there’s no question that, when you get 300 letters or e-mails, people are going to turn to one another and say, ‘What’s this all about?’ ”

“The more informed the letter is, the more likely it is to get a careful reading,” Simitian said.

Personal stories, said Chu, give “a human face to these cuts.”

Sometimes those faces come to Sacramento to plead in person.

Advocates for children in desperate need of medical care -- those with cancer, failing hearts and cerebral palsy, for example -- visited Chu last week to lobby against severe cuts in Medi-Cal, the state’s health-care program for the poor. One Californian in five qualifies for Medi-Cal in any given month. The governor has proposed reducing Medi-Cal spending by 10% immediately and by an additional 5% in the budget year that begins July 1.

In a half-hour visit, representatives of the Children’s Specialty Care Coalition made their case, along with Dr. Juan Alejos, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA who performs heart transplants, and Dr. Robert J. Dimand, a neurologist and director of pediatric critical care medicine at UC Davis Medical Center.

The doctors warned that Medi-Cal covers 80% of their young patients. The state’s payments are now so low, they said, that further cuts would force doctors to stop taking Medi-Cal recipients.

“I turned away a helicopter last night,” Dimand told Chu. The young patient was suffering from a breathing disorder, but was treated at another hospital.

“We are just right on the edge of having enough to hold it together,” Dimand said.

Alejos said he is overwhelmed by young heart disease patients who need transplants. As many as 60 children are examined each month at UCLA, he said, and those selected for transplants wait two to four months for a new heart.

“A lot of these kids don’t have months to wait,” Alejos said, warning that Medi-Cal cuts could drive doctors who do transplants to other states with better compensation.

Chu needed no persuasion. “I am very much against Medi-Cal cuts,” she said. But the assemblywoman reminded her visitors that the governor had rejected a bill to generate an additional $4 billion a year through higher vehicle registration fees, and so it is uncertain where cuts could be made to spare Medi-Cal.

Later, Chu met with lobbyists for nursing home operators. They complained that the basic Medi-Cal rate paid to nursing homes -- $104 a day -- falls far short of paying for necessary care.

“You can’t do it now for $104 a day,” said Greg Bearce, representing a nursing home sponsored by the Presbyterian Church. “If you cut it, you’re really in a disaster.”

Chu reminded the advocates that Democrats in the Legislature have so far resisted the governor’s proposed Medi-Cal cuts.

“I have tremendous support from Democratic lawmakers,” Chu said later. “I just hope the message gets to the other side of the aisle.”

There are, of course, crosscurrents to the correspondence: Don’t cut programs and don’t raise taxes. But some Californians offer sympathy and solutions for their lawmakers’ dilemma.

One Manhattan Beach man who wrote Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) offered to pay higher car taxes and “any other increase as well.”

Another Bowen correspondent, a Los Angeles civil engineer, praised her “hard work in these tough times” and recommended that registration fees be raised based on a vehicle’s weight and fuel economy -- in effect, an anti-sport utility vehicle tax.

But some of her correspondence came from tax protesters, including one soon-to-retire Californian. He opposed a hike in car registration fees because the state’s taxes are “already too high.”

“If they go up any more,” he wrote in an e-mail, “I’ll consider moving to another state.... My assets and pension check will go with me.”

Lawmakers said they take the correspondence seriously, even if they are able to personally check only a random sample of e-mails or have their staff summarize the mail.

Bowen said she finds herself caught between those who demand no new taxes and those who don’t want to cut school or health-care budgets.

“I’m certain that I’m going to cast many votes that people in my district don’t like and that I hate,” she said. “But there’s no choice. I have to do what is responsible.

“If people decide in the end that it still wasn’t the responsible thing for me to do,” Bowen said, “they get the choice at election time to do something about it.”