Budget Deadlock Broken

0

The California Legislature voted early Thursday to approve a massive budget package of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to close a $40 billion deficit after granting major concessions to one holdout Republican senator.

Lawmakers had been at a five-day impasse until Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders agreed to give Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, major changes he demanded in exchange for providing a crucial 27th vote for the state budget.

The votes came after what Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said was, at 45 1/2 hours, the single longest Senate floor session in California history.

The final plan includes most of the framework of the original budget compromise from Democratic and Republican leaders. There are billions of dollars in cuts to schools, healthcare institutions, higher education and programs for the poor. If signed by Schwarzenegger, who helped devise the package, it also would raise personal income taxes and the state sales tax, although a 12-cent per-gallon increase in gasoline taxes was eliminated in the final hours. The gas tax would be replaced with federal economic stimulus money.

Democrats initially said Maldonado’s call for “open” primaries, in which voters could cross party lines and candidates of all parties would compete in the same primary, followed by a runoff of the top two vote-getters, was too substantial to be pushed through in a budget deal. But Maldonado said the current budget stalemate proved that California could not return to fiscal sanity without fundamental changes in the way it elects its representatives.


& #8226;

Read the full

Sacramento Bee

story.


& #8226;

Read the full

Los Angeles Times

story.

No posts to display