These days, Edmund Gerald (Jerry) Brown Jr. probably
wishes he was anything other than California’s once and future
governor. The state’s intractable fiscal and educational woes,
along with its dysfunctional political culture, all but assure that
his third term in office will be even harder than his time
presiding over Golden State government 29 years ago.
Brown isn’t getting much help
from either fellow state officials or his political allies to shore
up $26 billion in budget shortfalls for this and the upcoming
fiscal year. Brown needs a two-thirds support from the state
legislature for approval of his request to ask voters to approve
$12 billion in tax extensions and new hikes. But
Republicans refuse to lend their votes (and their political
careers) to approve it. While Brown and his fellow Democrats can
put the plan on the ballot under the guise of extending earlier tax
increases, they are no more willing to risk political suicide than
their GOP counterparts.
Meanwhile Brown’s fellow
Democrats are balking at the governor’s plan to cut $12 billion in
spending. Assembly and Senate Democratic leaders voted down his
plan to shut down the state’s coterie of urban redevelopment
agencies (which has long provided welfare to real estate developers
at the expense of everyone else). University of California and
California State University students — many of whom come from
comfortable middle class homes — are protesting Brown’s move to
cut $1 billion from the university budgets. Back-benchers accuse
Brown of balancing the budgets on the backs of the poor. Declared
Assemblywoman Noreen Evans in the California Progress
Report: “The sacrifice is almost
exclusively being asked of our children and
grandchildren.”
The only ones to praise Brown so far are public sector
unions such as the American Federation of State County and
Municipal Employees and the state’s two largest teachers’ unions,
who backed his successful return to high office to the tune of $1.6
million, according to the National Institute on Money in State
Politics. That’s because Brown’s proposed cuts have largely
shielded state workers under collective bargaining from losing
jobs. But this will not last for long. Brown has already declared
that without the tax hikes, he would cut spending by 27 percent.
Hard-core unionists, annoyed over Brown’s other cuts, are spoiling
for a fight with both Brown and their own union leaders.
Brown isn’t the only new governor charged with dealing
with fiscal reckoning after decades of short- and long-term
profligacy. But unlike governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin
and even fellow political legatee Andrew Cuomo in New York, Brown
has a lot less flexibility in dealing with the problems. Decades of
fecklessness on nearly all fronts has left the Golden State in
shambles. Meanwhile Brown’s own allegiances to public sector unions
— including the state’s National Education Association and
American Federation of Teachers locals — means that he’s not even
attempting smart moves in areas that could bolster California’s
future for the long run.
Certainly this isn’t the first time Brown has steered the
state through periods of fiscal pain. As California’s governor
during the inflation and property tax revolt times of the 1970s, he
was as well known for eschewing state limousines, occasionally
cutting budgets and building up a $5 billion surplus, as for dating
singer Linda Ronstadt, touting alternative energy schemes, and
oddball statements that led him to be nicknamed Governor Moonbeam.
He even managed to get the endorsement of famed tax reformer Howard
Jarvis for a second term in 1978 after he responded to the passage
of Proposition 13 with a string of budget cuts and property tax
relief.
But it was easy to play the role of frugal liberal. His
father, the legendary Pat Brown, and future president Ronald Reagan
did most of the tax-and-spending, including greatly expanding the
state’s higher education and highway systems. More importantly, the
Golden State was in its economic and fiscal heyday; steady
migration from the East Coast, the rise of Silicon Valley, a
flourishing oil sector, and an aerospace sector fueled by federal
contracts helped overcome damage to the state from the byzantine
structure of state and local governments, and feckless voter
referendums.
This time around, Brown has taken back the reins after
three decades of governors and legislatures more-consumed by
dysfunction than good fiscal stewardship. Brown’s immediate
successor George Deukmejian presided over a doubling of the state
budget. During the 1990s, as Brown went from being state Democratic
Party boss to a presidential bid to becoming mayor of Oakland,
then-Gov. Pete Wilson and longtime state Assembly Speaker Willie
Brown were engaged in their own hijinks, fiscal and
otherwise.
Economic and fiscal conditions in the Golden State have
taken a turn for the worse over the past 12 years as the
brief-yet-disastrous gubernatorial tenure of Gray Davis was
followed by the longer (and even worse) reign of Arnold
Schwarzenegger. While the governors sparred with legislators over
budgets and missed deadlines to pass them, the fiscal profligacy
continued unabated. State spending increased by 77 percent between
the 1999-2000 and 2008-2009 fiscal years before the current
economic malaise finally forced state leaders to cut spending. In
that same time, voters passed referendums — from building new
schools to costly high-speed rail projects — that will cost them
$113 billion in principle and interest over the next three
decades.
Brown himself cannot escape blame for the state’s current
predicament; some of the problems in fact date to his previous
tenure. One of his most-damaging moves came just after the passage
of Prop. 13 in 1978 when he began pouring more state dollars into
local governments in order to stave off reductions in property tax
revenue. With the state stepping in to subsidize local government
(and later, to take on such matters as housing jail inmates),
municipalities began exercising even less restraint than they did
during the years before property tax relief. The effort (along with
Prop. 13, environmental rules and lawsuits by Native American
tribes) also helped make California’s housing market more expensive
by shifting the dominant source of revenue for local governments
from property taxes to sales taxes; to get more of that cash,
municipalities enacted land use rules to encourage the development
of shopping malls and car dealerships.
This time around, Brown has wrangle with more than just
the state’s fiscal problems. Decades of deal
making between NEA and other public-sector unions, state
governments, school districts, and municipalities has led to $516
billion in pension deficits and unfunded retiree healthcare
benefits,
according to the Pew Center on the States. But save for a move
by the state’s Teachers Retirement System to reduce its inflated
rate of return by a quarter of a percent, little is actually being
done to address the growing crisis. Within the past month, CalSTRS,
along with the gargantuan
California Public Employees Retirement System,
chastised a state commission for daring to
argue that the state should actually do something about it.
Brown isn’t exactly stepping up to the plate to address
it.
But Brown is tearing down the one thing immediate
predecessor Schwarzenegger and the state legislature managed to get
right: Reforming
the state’s woeful public schools. In January, the governor
tossed out seven of the eleven members of the state board of
education — including Ted Mitchell, the founder of school reform
vanguard NewSchools Venture Fund, and Ben Austin, who helped pass
the nation’s first Parent Trigger law — and replaced them with a
group that included a lobbyist for the NEA’s California
local.
Since then, the board has sat pat as an effort to use the
state’s Parent Trigger law — an effort in Compton to turn McKinley
Elementary School into a charter — has been obstructed by the
school district and its AFT local. This has set back efforts to
give parents a
dominant role in overhauling (or shutting down) the state’s
failure mills and improve the low quality of its teachers and
principals. None of Brown’s plans address the byzantine structure
of state boards, school districts, county agencies and other
entities that have long done a poor job of providing education to
the state’s students, which would actually save money for
taxpayers.
Given the problems at hand, Brown needs to do more than
just offer Solomonic solutions for the state’s fiscal crisis. He
could easily take a page from Walker, Cuomo, or even Chris Christie
in New Jersey and stare down the state’s political ancien
régime. Or maybe, he could just dust off his old playbook and
act like Jerry Brown circa 1976.
