Brown announces nearly $1 billion in new state budget cuts
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown announced nearly $1 billion in new state budget cuts, slashing spending on higher education and eliminating funding for free school-bus service but avoiding the deeper reductions to public schools that many had feared.
Services for the disabled, money for public libraries and funding for state prisons will also be pared. Most of the cuts, announced Tuesday, will take effect Jan. 1.
The reductions were built into the budget that Brown and lawmakers approved in June, set to kick in if revenue did not reach the optimistic level they had assumed. Brown warned that more cuts are around the corner, in the spending plan for 2012-13 that he will unveil next month.
"This is not the way we'd like to run California, but we have to live within our means," Brown said at a Capitol news conference. But he noted that the cuts could have been worse.
An earlier forecast from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office had schools bracing for cuts of more than $1.4 billion. Instead, a burst of corporate and personal income tax receipts that were higher than expected led the administration to raise its cash-flow projections. Now school budgets will be reduced by less than $80 million.
On top of that decrease is the loss of $248 million that pays for public school buses.
The governor said schools can pay for bus service out of their reserves, something that representatives from some large districts said they planned to do. Districts are required by federal law to provide transportation for certain special-education and some low-performing students.
Other cuts announced could also be thwarted by the courts. Among them is a $100 million reduction for workers who care for the sick and elderly in their homes. A federal judge recently issued a temporary order against such cuts in a lawsuit filed pre-emptively.
Those cuts "would place hundreds of thousands of fragile lives in jeopardy," said Laphonza Butler, president of the union that represents 180,000 home aides and nursing home workers. "We simply can't balance our state's budget on the backs of our most vulnerable residents."
The University of California and California State University systems are slated for an additional $100 million in cuts on top of the $650 million hit each took in the current budget. Officials from both had previously announced that they would not raise tuition further this year but said Tuesday that tuition increases and further reductions to academic programs are possible next year.
