Strong financial results, fueled by bullish stock markets and income-producing real estate, helped boost CalPERS’ funding level to 77% at the end of the 2014 fiscal year, up from 69.8% on June 30, 2013.
But, as Brown warns in his proposed 2015-16 budget, “economic expansions do not last forever. In the post-war period, the average expansion has been about five years. The current expansion has already exceeded the average by nine months. While there are few signs of immediate contraction, another recession is inevitable.”
They are the top vacation hoarders in a state bureaucracy with a lot of them. Tens of thousands of state employees have exceeded the official limit of 80 banked vacation days, leaving the state on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Gov. Brown wants state workers to begin paying half the cost of their future retiree health care — a big change for workers making no payments for coverage that can pay 100 percent of the premium for a retiree and 90 percent for their dependents.
The governor also wants state workers to be given the option of a lower-cost health insurance plan with higher deductibles. The state would contribute to a tax-deferred savings account to help cover out-of-pocket costs not covered by the plan.
The CBP’s report shows that even with increased state revenues and a continuing economic recovery that has yet to reach many Californians, the Governor’s proposed budget prioritizes fiscal austerity over investing in broadly shared prosperity. The Governor’s proposal does reflect a focus on policy changes enacted in prior years — such as California’s new K-12 funding formula and the state’s implementation of federal health care reform — that move the state forward in important ways. Yet, while the Governor’s proposal includes long-term plans for paying down budgetary debt and saving for a rainy day, it does not present a similar vision for tackling California’s biggest challenges: still-high levels of unemployment and poverty, widening income inequality, and a safety net severely weakened by years of funding cuts.
School-construction and home-building groups Monday launched an effort to qualify a $9 billion school bond for the November 2016 ballot, only days after Gov. Jerry Brown released a budget plan that minimized the state’s role in paying for building new classrooms and modernizing existing ones.
Despite signals that his administration was ready to undertake a sweeping change for how new schools are paid for and older ones updated, Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled Friday a far less substantial facilities program, pushing the larger policy debate off for another time.
Although lawmakers cut general fund expenditures by $16.6 billion during the recession from 2007-08 to 2011-12, they shifted money from funds to keep many of the programs operating.
The idea, he said, is to broaden the sales tax to possibly include legal work, advertising, Internet usage, dry cleaning and other services. At the same time, he would lower the personal and corporate income tax and even boost the minimum wage.
Brown offered few specifics for financing deferred transportation maintenance on Friday when he unveiled his $113 billion state spending plan, other than to say he’d bring a bipartisan group of lawmakers and stakeholders together.
About $467 million of the $560 million increase covers raises already scheduled for many union-covered employees, exempt state managers and supervisors, said Nick Schroeder, who tracks state employee costs for the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The balance would go to medical-benefit cost hikes and other anticipated employee-expense increases.
Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled a spending plan Friday that restores few recession-era spending cuts to social services, with schools and a voter-approved rainy day reserve benefiting the most from robust revenue growth in recent months.
California public schools and community colleges will reap the lion’s share of revenues from a booming economy, with their budgets growing by $7.8 billion this year and next, Gov. Jerry Brown proposed Friday.
Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today proposed a carefully balanced budget that injects billions of dollars more into schools and health care coverage, holds college tuition flat and delivers on Propositions 1 and 2 by investing in long overdue water projects and saving money, while continuing to chip away at the state’s other long-term liabilities – debt, infrastructure, retiree health care and climate change.
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown cautioned against “exuberant overkill” on spending when he released his $164.7-billion budget proposal for 2015-16 on Friday, but pressure already is mounting in the Democratic-controlled Legislature to offer more state assistance to Californians struggling financially..