California is going broke, the governor said as he declared a fiscal emergency on Monday, calling lawmakers into a special session to grapple anew with an $11.2 billion deficit.

Which got The Watchdog to thinking about the Good Old Days. “Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said in his “State of the State” address in January 2004. “I don’t want to move boxes around; I want to blow them up.”

Boom! ”We have multiple departments with overlapping responsibilities. I say consolidate them.”

Boom! “We have boards and commissions that serve no pressing public need. I say abolish them.”

Boom! “I plan a total review of government - its performance, its practices, its cost.”

Boom, indeed. The fruit of these explosions was delivered in 2005 - in the California Performance Review, a blow-up-the-boxes-blueprint for government reform detailing some $32 billion in savings. (Doesn’t that sound good right about now?) It scrutinized more than 300 state boards and commissions and recommended axing 88 of them.

Yet nearly four years - and many crippling budget crises - later, there’s little to show for it. “Not only did these recommendations fall on deaf ears,” outgoing state Rep. Todd Spitzer recently told The Watchdog, “but since this report was released, state government has dramatically grown. In fact, since the Governor took office, the state has added nearly 700,000 jobs.”

Our great state’s black hole is expected to hit $28 billion over the next year-and-a-half unless something is done. Schwarzenegger’s emergency declaration authorizes the governor and lawmakers to change the existing budget within the next 45 days. Without quick action, the state might run out of cash in February.

Ak. Whither the California Performance Review and its $32 billion savings?!

It’s not exactly that the Governator didn’t try. (Our colleague John Gittelsohn catalogued the incredible quagmire attendant to such reform attempts in “Part-time work, full-time pay.”)  Yet when The Watchdog asked the governor’s office about what the heck happened to the California Performance Review - asking, specifically, “Does it seem like, rather than blowing up the boxes, the boxes blew up him?” - Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said, “I don’t understand the question.”

The governor, McLear said, ”has been reforming since the minute he got into office.” He offered examples:

• A revamped workers compensation system that’s easier on employers.
• Budget reform that would create a rainy-day fund for California (which will appear on next year’s ballot).
• Redistricting reform (the just-passed Proposition 11), which may elect more centrist and responsive leaders.
• A revamped Department of Motor Vehicles, where many services have gone online and wait times have dropped.
• A streamlined juvenile corrections department was merged into the larger department of corrections.
• Marrying the state’s emergency services department with its homeland security department.

“The governor totally agrees that we need to constantly look for waste, fraud and abuse in state government and root that out,” McLear said. “But some are suggesting that if we get rid of waste, fraud and abuse, that could solve our budget shortfall. That’s just not the case.”

He even emailed The Watchdog a quote from nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor, backing that up.

The Governator, of course, thinks that the fairest way to plug the hole is through budget cuts and tax hikes (raising the sales tax to 8.75 percent - from 7.25 percent - for three years; raising motor vehicle fees, etc.).

Democrats are with him, but Republicans will ice skate in hell before budging from their no-new-taxes stance.

We the People are getting very tired of this nonsense.

There is a structural problem in the state budget. Fix it.

We spend more than we take in. Stop it.

And there is a rather exhaustive 2,500 page blueprint of ideas - put together by 275 people - on how to make California government more efficient. For goodness sake! Use it!

(An aside on that awesome picture of Schwarzenegger and the cat: Found it here, under the heading “An unreleased scene from the movie Commando.”)

More Watchdog:

• After priest scandal, Catholic Diocese’s financial rebound is heavenly
• Hoag, CHOC hospital execs earn more than $1 million each
• OC charity for burn victims burns donors
• OC Scouts leader’s pay rose while revenue fell
• AIG junket - the movie! Bailed-out execs luxuriate on tape
• AIG subsidiary parties in style in OC, two weeks after bailout
• Yet another AIG subsidiary parties hearty days after bailout
• High-flying AIG subsidiary gets to play with Uncle Sam’s dough, too
• Truth or dare? AIG ordered to bare all its secrets
• Should feds have let AIG go bankrupt?
• Bailed-out banks ordered to reveal executive compensation
• AIG suspends controversial executive payouts worth millions
• God’s quid pro quo?
• Earthly kingdom: Trinity’s $167 million in real estate
• Crusading for ‘Judeo-Christian values’ doesn’t come cheap
• OC Scouts leader’s pay rose while revenue fell

Posted in: Financial meltdown • Money • State government • Taxes |

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