Maldonado ready to vote aye (Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert)

By Kevin Yamamura
Sacramento Bee Capitol Alert
February 19, 2009

Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, said he's ready to vote for the budget after scoring major concessions from legislative leaders as part of a plan to bridge a $40 billion deficit. The only remaining question is whether two-thirds of both houses will provide enough votes to give Maldonado what he wants.

As part of Maldonado's negotiated package, lawmakers will place on the June 2010 ballot an open primary proposal intended to favor more candidates such as him. The proposal would impact congressional and state races in 2012 and beyond. Under the plan, the top two candidates in a primary would face off in a general election. Candidates would not participate in partisan primaries, but they would be able to retain their party labels on the ballot.

Maldonado will be termed out of the state Senate in 2012. He is rumored to be considering a run for state controller in 2010, though he said he has not yet decided his political plans.

Leaders also agreed to Maldonado's demand to eliminate the 12-cent additional gas tax, which was estimated to have brought in $2.1 billion through June 2010.

As part of the changes, a 5 percent surtax on income taxes will be replaced by a 0.25 percent boost in each income-tax bracket. That increases the state's highest income tax rate from 9.3 percent to 9.55 percent (actually 10.55 percent for millionaires with the Proposition 63 mental-health tax). If the state receives at least $10 billion in federal stimulus money, that surcharge would drop to 0.125 percent. The new formula would raise about $400 million more in income taxes than the previous proposal.

The rest of the lost gas-tax revenues will be replaced by federal stimulus money and $600 million to $700 million in Schwarzenegger line-item vetoes.

"Right when we're trying to move California forward, people are paying more in gasoline, and I made a request," Maldonado said.

Maldonado also won a constitutional amendment to prohibit legislative raises in deficit years, which would appear on the May 19 special election ballot. But legislative leaders refused to grant him his proposal to eliminate legislative pay altogether when the budget is late. They believe that idea is unconstitutional, though Maldonado disputed that notion.

"The choices were hard," Maldonado said. "Do I want to make my home state solvent? Do I want to protect education? Do I want to keep it from going off the cliff? Or do I want to continue to vote 'no' and run this state in the wrong direction? I'll tell you something, I'd like to have seen somebody else vote for this budget. And it would have been easy for me to cast a 'no' vote. But during difficult times, you need to step up to the plate."

He won one more request: eliminate $1 million in funding for state Controller John Chiang to pay for new workstations. Maldonado said the expenditures were wasteful, but Chiang's office said the money, previously approved by lawmakers, is being spent to consolidate staff in one location and save future costs.

Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, feared that lawmakers might be setting a bad precedent by giving into Maldonado's extensive demands.

"I do think there's an important integrity issue that a deal's a deal and continuing to leverage for more, at some point, is just rewarding bad behavior on our part," DeSaulnier said.

The deal provided a lesson in how budget leverage works.

Sen. Dave Cox, R-Fair Oaks, was widely expected to provide the 27th Senate vote on Saturday, but he objected to the deal and voted against it. Cox has been critical of the state's First 5 early childhood development programs, funded by cigarette taxes, and he has sought to take as much of its funding as possible for other General Fund programs. But with Cox not voting for the budget, Democrats slipped in a bill slightly reducing the amount of money that the First 5 programs will lose.