Governor Schwarzenegger held a press conference in Fresno Friday morning in front of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department. The Governor passed out three pages, front and back; with reasons he says the people should be pleased with the budget that was finally passed.
As part of the budget that was passed, lawmakers approved six ballot measures that will be voted on by the people of California in May. The Governor says those measures will finally fix the state’s dysfunctional budget process.
Governor Schwarzenegger said, “In one year, when we have a lot of money and the economy is doing well… we have all the money in the world and we can go and increase funding for education and for higher education, for law enforcement and for health care and all of those different programs… only to find ourselves taking billions of dollars away from those very important programs when the economy goes down. It’s a dysfunctional system…”
California Assemblyman and Republican Leader Mike Villines said, “…the chance to have a spending cap in California can level, level and have a reliable spending stream now. Now more peaks and valleys, so that we can finally have government maintain what it should… that local government isn’t beholding to Sacramento to steal their money anymore and that we don’t grow more than we should. That spending cap that will be on the ballot is good for California, it’s good for children, it’s good for seniors and we just encourage everyone to go out and support that…”
Three of the measures that were talked about at the press conference were; blocking legislative pay raises during down times, a “rainy day fund” that would cap spending growth in good times to put money into reserves for bad times and a measure to remove partisan politics from some primary elections. These measures and three others will be on the ballot on May 19th.
