Slicing up the state's budget pie

By Cara Mia DiMassa

May 24, 2009 12 AM PT

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers struggle to trim as much as $24 billion from the budget, they are trying to do it almost entirely by cuts in spending. “We don’t want to solve this budget through gimmicks and much borrowing,” Schwarzenegger said.

The cuts will touch all corners of the state bureaucracy, but most will come from the biggest pieces of the budget pie: education, health and human services, and corrections. Some leaders in those fields explain how they would make necessary, but painful, cuts.

Public education

The governor proposes cutting at least $3 billion from the education budget, the state’s biggest expenditure, and that could increase to as much as $5.3 billion. Of those cuts, about $1 billion is to come from the current school year, which is nearly over.

Caprice Young

Former board president

A significant amount of the state’s education expenditures is wasted on “over-regulation,” Young says.

A former president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education and former chief executive officer of the California Charter Schools Assn., she says that too much of a school district’s budget goes “to complying with a whole lot of regulatory mumbo jumbo. There are endless forms that have to constantly be filled out. I’m not talking about reducing accountability -- I’m talking about reducing bureaucracy.”

California’s public schools, she said, often must juggle more than 100 categorical funds, each of which require special forms that administrators must fill out as they use the funds. Charter schools, by contrast, she said, have fewer than a dozen such funds.

“By reducing the number of funding sources, and providing the flexibility to the schools to do the work they need to do, you then take the money out of the bureaucracy and put it into school sites. There is no reason not to do that. It would be a better course of action even if there weren’t a budget crisis.”

Young said the governor and the Legislature should ensure that the cuts California is about to face do not hurt children.

Marty Hittleman

Teachers union president

Before thinking about making cuts to the budget, the governor should ensure that state Republicans agree to new revenue sources, either taxes or fees -- “not student fees, but fees on other things,” Hittleman says.

The president of the California Federation of Teachers said that the deficit is so large “you could cut the prisons, the Cal State schools, the University of California and you still wouldn’t have enough money.”

Hittleman was a math professor at L.A. Valley College before he took over leadership of the group, which represents more than 120,000 educational employees in schools ranging from Head Start to the University of California.

Hittleman said the state should eliminate “some of the onerous things that the schools are doing, like excessive testing,” which he says takes time and money away from classroom instruction.

He suggests trying to obtain a temporary waiver from the federal government of the testing requirements.

Hittleman insists that larger class sizes -- one of the cost reductions being considered -- are not an acceptable solution. “Small classes help students learn,” he said. “I would keep in mind that a student only has one chance at first grade.”

Health and human services

Schwarzenegger is considering dismantling CalWorks, which helps more than 500,000 poor families, and eliminating a health insurance program that reaches almost 1 million children and teens, as well as slashing disease education and prevention programs.

Dr. Robert Ross

Former health official

The president of the California Endowment, Ross suggests that Sacramento first raise revenue. He proposes a tax or fee on “unhealthy products that directly contribute to our healthcare costs in the state: tobacco of course, but also alcohol, sodas and junk food.”

Ross, who has served as the director of San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency, said such a tax or fee could be levied for an interim period, until other structural budgeting and fiscal reforms kick in.

In the meantime, he said, because sodas and junk food especially contribute to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and strokes, “you get a double bottom line: you raise revenue, but you cut your healthcare costs over the long haul.”

He also said that in the past, hospitals and other healthcare providers have agreed to assess provider fees on themselves that eventually would draw more matching federal dollars to the state and could improve Medicaid reimbursement rates. He said lawmakers should revisit that option as they consider other ways to raise revenues.

“There’s not a long list of options,” Ross admits. But, he adds, slashing the state’s safety net for the poor would “border on the inhumane.”

Dr. Susan Love

Professor of medicine

In some ways, Love said, dealing with the budget is a lot like fighting breast cancer: “When someone is diagnosed with breast cancer, we often do a mastectomy, even though our real goal would be to prevent it in the first place.”

If the healthcare budget has to be trimmed, Love said, then healthcare in the state should be re-imagined.

“What we need to do is to move a lot of the healthcare out of the emergency rooms and into primary care,” she said. “I think that means a single-party payer system that includes covering the people who are undocumented as well. They are going to be in the emergency rooms.”

Love notes that finding a way to treat people now without insurance will help people who do have it. “When you get chest pains, you are in line. It does affect you,” she said.

Love said that having places where residents can get primary and preventive care outside of emergency rooms would save the state money.

“The care that you get in an emergency room is by definition much more expensive than if you got it in a doctor’s office or a clinic,” she said. “Just getting people out of the emergency rooms, getting them care in a way that could be cost effective -- that would be huge.”

Corrections and rehabilitation

Many of the governor’s proposed 5,000 job cuts probably would come from the prison system. In addition, low-level offenders could be kept in local jails, and nonviolent prisoners who are illegal immigrants could be shifted to federal custody.

Jim O’Connell

Mental health expert

“I would dismantle the criminal justice system,” says the chief operating officer of Social Model Recovery Systems Inc., which provides mental health and alcohol and other drug treatment services around Southern California.

Working with people fighting addiction, he said, shows “we need a societal shift away from the criminalization of the disease of addiction toward prevention and treatment.”

O’Connell estimates that up to 85% of the California prison population is there for nonviolent drug offenses, and treating them as patients, rather than prisoners, would have an immediate and lasting effect on the state’s economy.

O’Connell cautions that violent drug offenders should remain in prison, as should drunk drivers who have hurt or killed someone. “But you should also have the opportunity to get help for the disease of alcoholism so that you don’t do it again,” he added.

He said that expanding drug and alcohol treatment also would reduce recidivism.

O’Connell said that California should look, as a model, to what has been done to decrease the use of nicotine, or even to the recent swine flu outbreak. “We were able to find tremendous resources and ramp up,” he said. “People saw it as a grave threat.”

Jeanne Woodford

Former prison warden

The former director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said cuts should focus on reducing costs and the number of people incarcerated.

Chief among Woodford’s priorities would be ending parole for nonserious, nonviolent offenders and looking at who is sent to prison in the first place. “People who are drug offenders shouldn’t be sent to prison,” she said.

Releasing the estimated 12,000 people in prison for simple drug possession could save $500 million, she said.

Woodford also suggests that California look at ending the death penalty. “That could save us, over five years, $1 billion,” she said.

Another option, she suggests, would be for the governor to commute the sentences of everyone on death row.

Woodford suggested revising the three-strikes law to exclude nonviolent offenses as third strikes or, at a minimum, review cases after offenders have been in prison for some time. She said that as prisoners age, they are more costly to care for and their risk of re-offending is diminished.

As for the governor’s plan to sell San Quentin, Woodford, the prison’s former warden, called the idea “ridiculous.”

She said it would take years to prepare it for development.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

K-12, colleges (2008-09 budget)

$59,724,727

41.4%

Health and welfare (2008-09 budget)

$39,395,472

27.3%

Prisons (2008-09 budget)

$10,365,159

7.2%