I spent the last few days in California’s capitol city, Sacramento. I was there lobbying for low-income energy and community service programs. Basically, this state has been in a perpetual budget crisis for over a decade. This economist article sums up the ingrained and systemic problems with the state government that shows why the state cannot seem to find solutions to these types of problems.
I was in Sacramento to advocate for the state department that distributes our federal block grant money. The governor has proposed to eliminate the CA Department of Community Services and Development in favor of giving our Low-Income Weatherization dollars to a newly proposed CA Department of Energy. In his last year in office, Schwarzenegger so far has proposed these cuts as well: eliminating state sponsored children’s health insurance, cutting Cal grants for incoming and future college students, closing down over 200 state parks (including all the state parks in Humboldt County) and eliminating CALWorks (the core welfare program for the state). Because it is a time of “crisis” all bills are being sent directly to the Budget Conference Committee, which typically acts as the place where bills passed by the Senate and the Assembly are merged to send one bill to the governor to sign, bypassing the normal legislative process. Because our issue is small (doesn’t actually save the state any money), we have been fighting just to figure out when decisions are being made, who is making them and how to educate legislators about why this cut doesn’t make sense. It is particularly hard to do this when you are hundreds of miles away and without proper political connections. So we ended up hiring this amazing lobbyist who used to work for the Governor during his first term. She took us around to different Senate offices so that we could argue our case. Most legislation seems to happen behind closed doors.
The Capitol building is amazing. A large white dome stands out around the drab, grey skyline of the city. The hearing we went to was in front of the Senate Humane Services Committee. The week before it had been in front of the Conference Committee and they kicked it back to this committee for further review. It was government at its most inefficient level. The purpose behind all these hearings is to find a way to cut California’s 24 billion dollar budget deficit, which seems to be growing massively by the day. Cutting our department is more about creating Schwarzenegger’s legacy then really doing anything productive. He has made climate change a key part of his platform and by creating a Dept. of Energy, he can cement in people’s minds that California is progressive and great when it comes to climate issues. Unfortunately, this is a needless adjustment to a self-sufficient and efficient program. Although it sounds good to say we are consolidating government and bunching energy programs together in reality it adds lots of bureaucracy and deconstructs a set of programs that strive to give operational control to the local level and allows for quick and versatile changes to happen when problems arise. Putting the Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission and the Low-income energy programs together will greatly decrease the service delivery that we see right now and could mean the end to the program as we know it.
The hearing was short. The deputy director of CSD told the Senators what our programs were, that the department is entirely federally funded and that there would be no real savings by moving the department. My boss along with others also testified to that point. Immediately, Senator George Runner asked if anyone was there supporting this proposal, no one was. So they decided to go on a hunt for someone from the Department of Finance to get their input. The whole thing was ridiculous. Why would you have a hearing about cutting the budget and not insist on having people from the Department of Finance there? Of course the people who work for or get money from a state department are not going to argue for its demise. In this case the proposal doesn’t make sense but I could see these things happening over and over again. When they finally found someone from the Department of Finance, he wasn’t familiar with the issues and he couldn’t answer their questions. Basically it was a waste of everyone’s time. I found it incredibly fascinating.
