Sleepy Future

In his State of the State report last week, Gov. George Deukmejian said that California is “more prosperous . . . than at any time in its history.” You would not guess that from his budget, which is nowhere more parsimonious and lacking in common sense than in programs that California needs to keep prospering.

Education tops the list of crucial programs that he proposes to shortchange, although it is not the only one. The best educated people cannot function without adequate transportation, an environment as clean as humans can keep it, and safe places to work. Programs in these areas, too, would get much less money than the amounts required to keep California what the governor called “the state where America’s future begins.”

Government is often the last resort for the poor and the elderly, and for them the budget news is even more grim. His plan for further cuts in Medi-Cal, following on cuts earlier this year that eroded service, can only dangerously weaken the program. Proposed cuts in state funds for counties would jeopardize services to the medically indigent adults who fall outside all other programs, including Medi-Cal. To make matters worse, many of these cuts would only postpone treatment, often inviting an increase in the ultimate cost to tax-payers.

Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction, calculates that public schools need $750 million in the next budget to cover higher costs, teacher salary increases and further classroom reforms designed to improve the quality of education. They will get less than 20% of that, Honig says, a share too small to prevent California’s spending per student from sliding back to where it was when reforms started in 1983. The Deukmejian budget would reduce class sizes in the first through third grades, but would do so at the expense of programs that enhance education for gifted, disadvantaged and minority students. Honig may have understated the case when he called the education budget a “disaster.”

Even university campuses, which in recent years have been heavily, if belatedly, favored by the governor, will be on subsistence rations under the proposals. Faculty salaries would increase by 3%, about half what the University of California and the California State University systems requested. The effective rate this year would be 1.5% under Deukmejian’s plan to grant the raises halfway through the budget year.

There is no money at all to implement the sweeping toxics program that voters approved last November with Proposition 65; that will come later, the governor said.

California depends more on the automobile than most urban states do, and must start depending as well on rail systems to commute. The governor’s addition of $250 million to the transportation budget looks impressive, but it is not even close to what Californians need to keep moving at rush hour.

Higher taxes on gasoline would make it possible for the state to stop losing ground to traffic jams, and tax increases in other areas would make it possible for the state where America’s future begins to cover other deficiencies, but with the budget came a renewal of Deukmejian’s pledge not to go in that direction.

The governor’s budget is a conservative document, but it will not conserve. It will, at best, slow down the rate at which California falls behind its public obligations to create a framework in which its citizens can prosper. Unfortunately, reading it is like watching the ghost of poet Robert Frost step to a podium, survey the future that California can build for itself, and intone, “We have miles to go, and promises to keep, but first let’s pull over, and get some sleep.”