Jerry Brown: a major budget challenge

20 January 2011 |permalink | email article

The third-term California governor said January 10 that his austere budget plan is “going to take sacrifice from every sector of California.  But he expressed confidence at a state Capitol news conference that voters would approve deep cuts, and a five-year extension of taxes. He’s also said he may take his proposed budget show on the road at some point. 

But Brpwn’s idea to shift more authority to local governments, and eliminate municipal redevelopment agencies that would take billions out of state control and send it instead to school districts, counties and the state has created a major political firestorm. Out front is Los Angeles where Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called Brown’s proposal a “nonstarter.”

Brown’s ambitious plan to also cut enterprise zones and raise taxes, John Howard wrote in the Capitol Weekly, “may face its most profound opposition not in the Capitol or at the ballot box but in the courts.” A key issue is Proposition 22, the voter-approved ballot measure that bars the state from tapping local money to balance the state budget. Approved in November the initiative specifically included the funds of some 400 redevelopment agencies under its protection.

Briefs

Billionaire Meg Whitman, a world class flop as the Republican nominee for California governor, is in from the cold. She speaks today at the Harvard Club in San Francisco. The event is limited to 20 young female alumni, the club’s site says, stressing her decade-long experience as CEO at eBay. No press……Gavin Newsom, the brash former San Francisco mayor and now state lieutenant governor, in his first remarks at a University of California Board of Regents meeting yesterday, suggested challenging half a billion dollars in cuts in the UC system proposed by Brown. “I’m not convinced we’re going to lose that half of billion dollars,” Is Newsom, now on the Board of Regents, suggesting he won’t necessarily be Brown’s clone?

A man for all seasons

“Yes, indeed. Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own.” – R. Sargent Shiver, who died Tuesday at 95, addressing graduating students at Yale in 1994. A Kennedy in-law, he was the founding director of the Peace Corps, architect of LBJ’s war on poverty, U.S. ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972.

 

182