The first major change in the May Revise budget has leaked to the SacBee - Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to release 20,000 low-risk offenders from prison has been dropped in the face of legislative opposition:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dumped his plan to release about 22,000 lower-risk inmates from prison before they complete their terms, The Bee learned Monday.
The revised budget he will present on Wednesday will jettison the plan, which would have freed prisoners doing time for crimes such as drug possession and car theft who had less than 20 months to go on their terms.
The governor had sought the change as part of a 10 percent, across-the-board general fund budget cut to deal with a multibillion-dollar deficit.
His plan was unlikely, however, to win support in upcoming budget negotiations. Not a single legislator in the state had expressed support for the idea.
It's unfortunate that this plan is being dropped, as most of these inmates targeted for release are not particularly violent offenders. California's prison population has grown too large for us to handle capably or safely, and the cuts were one of the low-hanging fruit in finding savings within the current budget.
Obviously this raises the question of what cuts will be proposed in tomorrow's budget revise. If Arnold is willing to abandon the early release plan is it too much to hope that he's going to abandon the destructive schools cuts too? Yeah, probably is. Those cuts will likely remain, and are probably going to be augmented by other damaging cuts to core public services, especially as Arnold's now got to find $1.2 billion in the budget that was otherwise going to have been saved by the early release.
The other major question surrounding the May Revise is what, if any, new revenues Arnold will propose. I don't hold out much hope that Arnold is going to propose major new revenues, as his Republican predecessors Pete Wilson and Ronald Reagan did. That's not Arnold's style. There may be a few revenue solutions here, but they will likely be small in proportion to the much larger cuts that he is going to insist upon.
Democrats have a short amount of time now to make their case to the public. New Speaker Karen Bass understands that the budget is her top priority - let's hope she will be able to provide the budget leadership that has been sorely lacking from Democrats these last 30 years. |
