Well this is disturbing. It’s widely reported this morning (see rtumble) that the Governor is trying to get the CA League of Cities on board with Proposition 76, the school budget limits and imperial Governorship initiative, even though it would obviously be completely insane for them to do so. He’s trying to play off the same fears that drove support for last year’s Proposition 1A, namely that the state will raid local budgets at will when times are bad.
For better or for worse, Prop 1A passed, so the Governor isn’t exactly being straight with the league here. Beyond that, the main reason the cities would be insane to support this is that it’s going to lock in austerity budgets (like what we’re experiencing now), for the entire state, forever. (or at least until we overturn it, like Colorado is having to do with TABOR, a similar bill passed by Republican extremists in their state ten years ago).
It’s complicated, but think for a second about how national, state and local budgets are all chained together. Money is constantly going back and forth between all of them. So with the national fiscal picture a complete shambles due to President Bush’s “bash,break and borrow” strategy, it has cascading effects all the way down to individual cities. Now the Governor wants to lock that policy in place in this state, and he’s trying to get the league of cities to vote against their best interests by scaring them and playing to their parochial interests. It should be interesting to see how this gambit of his turns out.
Addendum: Jen’s got an even better post on this over at PowerPac today. This was a case of unpremeditated coordination; sometimes one look at rough & tumble is all either of us needs!