Legislators OKd Budget That None of Them Liked : Government: Most members of South Bay delegation voted for state spending plan they criticized. But they said voting no would have only made things worse.

Democratic state Sen. Ralph C. Dills of Gardena condemns the state budget that cleared the Legislature last week as “horrible” and “indecent” because it would set the stage for painful social service cuts.

Republican Assemblyman Gerald N. Felando of San Pedro, meanwhile, lambastes the $56.4-billion spending plan because it wouldn’t cut social spending enough.

So why did both men vote for the budget? Are we witnessing a kinder, gentler Gerald Felando? A rougher, tougher Ralph Dills?

Like most state legislators representing the South Bay, Dills and Felando say they backed the budget for a simple reason: With the state facing an unprecedented $14.3-billion deficit, passing a bad spending plan is far better than passing no spending plan at all.

“I feel a responsibility to get out the budget, much as it cuts into my district in a Draconian and vicious fashion,” Dills said. “The alternative of not passing a budget would have terrible ramifications. The whole financial picture of the state is up in the air.”

Said Felando: “You’d bankrupt the state.”

The budget bill, now on Gov. Pete Wilson’s desk, does not include controversial tax increases and spending cuts that must be enacted if the fiscal 1991-92 spending plan is to take effect. But it does lay the groundwork for those measures, so debate was intense.

Of the five Assembly members and three state senators representing the South Bay, only Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) voted against the budget. Her chief concern, she says, was that the legislation prepares the way for a proposed 4.4% reduction in grants to poor women under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program and a five-year suspension of automatic cost-of-living increases for most health and welfare programs.

In the South Bay, such austerity would have broad effect. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, about 20,000 South Bay families receive AFDC assistance. Under the proposed cuts, payments to AFDC recipients with two children would decline to $663 a month from $694 a month.

“The (Senate) leadership sold the entire package to the Republicans and Democrats, saying that this was what it would take to get the governor and the Assembly to sign off,” said Watson, one of only eight senators to vote against the budget bill when it came before the Senate on June 15. “It’s an acquiescence, and it would be devastating for those in the lower socioeconomic brackets.”

Dills agreed strongly with Watson on this and other budget issues. Like her, for instance, he supports the so far unsuccessful attempts to raise more money for social services by boosting the income tax rate for California’s upper-income earners.

But Dills says low-income constituents would suffer if he and other Democrats held out, driving the Legislature into political gridlock and leaving the state without a budget on July 1, the start of fiscal 1991-92.

“I wanted to vote against it as much as (Watson) and the rest of them did,” Dills said. “But we have thousands of people out there who depend on the state for their rent money, for their food money, for many things they need to live on.”

State Sen. Robert G. Beverly (R-Manhattan Beach) says he, too, has quarrels with the budget, particularly because it is based, in part, on the elimination of certain tax exemptions. But at this late date, he said, the time for quarreling is over.

“I think we’re at a point where you have to get realistic,” Beverly said.

South Bay members of the Assembly, where the budget vote was far closer and more hotly contested than in the Senate, had no shortage of complaints about the budget.

Felando faced one of the South Bay delegation’s most interesting dilemmas. In voting in favor of the budget--one of only nine of the Assembly’s 31 Republicans to do so--he broke with hard-line Assembly Republicans who were holding out for fewer tax increases, deeper spending cuts and structural reforms in state government.

He attributes his decision to appeals from Wilson, a Republican, who stitched the budget plan together in negotiations with Senate leaders, and to his own growing alarm about the effects of a protracted budget battle.

Most important, Felando says, was a meeting he attended between lawmakers and state Treasurer Kathleen Brown. During the meeting, Felando recalls, Brown said delays in enacting the state budget would jeopardize California’s AAA bond rating, making government borrowing more costly, and worsen a shortage of cash in state coffers.

After helping to give the budget the bare two-thirds majority required for passage, Felando criticized the Assembly’s Republican leaders, saying they “want to be part of the problem but not part of the solution.”

But he hastened to add that he would have preferred a spending plan more akin to the one envisioned by his conservative colleagues.

“I don’t like any part of this budget,” Felando said. “I was gagging all the way.”

The four other Assembly members with South Bay constituents also grouse about the budget--even though they all voted for it.

Dave Elder (D-San Pedro) said he was disappointed that the spending plan does not include more money for schools. Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles), Richard Floyd (D-Carson) and Curtis Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood) said they fret about the effect cuts in essential social services will have on their low-income constituents.

But Tucker said that having failed to muster the necessary political support for such proposals as the income tax increase for wealthy Californians, he and the other South Bay Democrats had no choice but to stomach their concerns and vote for the budget.

Given the slim margin of victory in the Assembly, he added, members could not afford to cast a symbolic negative vote and risk a budget deadlock and destructive interruptions in state services.

“I would have loved to have known there were enough votes to get the budget out, and I could have said, ‘Hell no, I’m not going to vote for it,” Tucker said. “But every vote in the Assembly on this budget is the decisive vote. We don’t have any spares.”