By now many of you have heard the Governor’s State of the State address or heard about his recent budget proposals. Despite the hue and cry from special interest groups about the slashing and the cuts, I want you to understand the crazy formula the California legislature uses for a “base line budget”.
In these tough economic times, (and for most of Foster City’s existence), local government uses a zero base budgeting method. This means every department starts at zero and then justifies to the controlling policy making body (the city council) what resources that department needs to fulfill its goals.
In Foster City for the last year or so, we have not only used this method, but asked the City Manager to prepare a budget that balances the budget based on current projected revenues, a budget based on his recommendation of additional program that could or should be added to the budget (using our reserves to pay that price ticket). Then the council for more than a month and several long painstaking meetings makes the tough decisions of what can be funded or not.
In Sacramento, Voodoo budgeting has been the norm for years. There is no zero based budgeting. There is not even baseline budgeting (i.e. keeping the budget at what was spent last year.) Indeed, the formula used is taking what was spent last year and ADDING a set percentage to create a new higher “baseline” budget. So, when the Governor is slashing the budget, he is not really reducing spending from last year, he is just not agreeing to the billions in dollars of increases allowed by the budgeting formula.
For example, last year the state spent 34.4 billion dollars in K-12 education, while this year the proposed budget will spend $35.8 billion, yet this is portrayed as a billion dollar cut to education. In fact every general category of the governor’s budget went up (according to SF Chronicle 1/11/2005) except Environmental Protection was decreased by $5 million and general government was proposed to be reduced by $303 million.
So, under the Governor’s current proposal, last year’s budget was $82.3 billion and his proposal this year is $85.7 billion. Somehow this equates to “slashing the budget”. I must have missed that day in math class, because it looks like an increase to me.
The State actually increased revenues this year by $5 billion dollars, yet government departments demand more. Now I know there are many worthy programs that need to be funded (not the least of which is education), but if Cities and Counties can understand the concept of balancing a budget within their means, why is it when our legislators go to Sacramento, they forget the concept of not spending more money than is being taken in.
Once again the funds from Prop 42, that requires gas sales tax go to fund road and transportation projects, is being hijacked to cover general fund obligations. And, the State is still attempting to shift the responsibility of health and human services programs to the county level without providing reimbursement to local programs for those costs.
It is time that the legislature stops playing politics and make some hard decisions to balance its own budget. (Foster City’s budget discussions will begin in April).
Councilmember Wilder can be reached at dwilder@fostercity.org.
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