The San Mateo County County Procedure puts tricks to budget CA

From And WaltersCalmness

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California has a regretful story of short -sighted state budgets, leading to periodic crises when revenue does not reach coincide because of economic delays or fantastic expectations. Thehe BudgetIt has come into force in June, it is an example.

Three years ago, governor Gavin Newo announced that the state had an excess of $ 97.5 billion based on what was forecasts for revenue around $ 40 billion a year higher than reality. The excess phantom generates major increases in costs that cannot be maintained.

The budget of the General Fund 2025-26 has actual 20 billion dollar difference between income and output This is covered by immersion in emergency reserves, accounting tricks and borrowed borrowers and outside the books. Moreover, both administration and budget legislative advisers believe that A ”structural deficit“It will feel indefinitely.

The tools and tricks used to close the abyss of the current budget come from the inventory of techniques that fiscal internal persons have developed for several decades and give managers, such as double fleet, triple flowns and eraf, who only understand veterans of continuous vapors for money in capito.

Eraf means Fund to increase educational revenue And was created 33 years ago, during the first term of the Republican governor Pete Wilson, to help him and legislators deal with the budget deficit caused by a recession. They diverted billions of dollars taxes on ownership of local authorities to school districts through the increase in the Fund, thus reducing the state’s constitutional obligation to finance education and closing the state budget deficit.

Although local authorities had to eat a major revenue reduction, Wilson and legislators later invent it – more or less – with receipts from a new sales tax, although they limit money to police and fire services.

Similar maneuvers have been used to cover the subsequent budget clips, including one that the newly elected governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, hired in 2004, to help fill the main hole in the budget he inherited after Gray Davis was recalled by voters.

Thehe Scheme since 2004 They included the transfer of another $ 1.3 billion taxes on local property in schools and the elimination of the historic share of local governments from the licensed vehicle fees. In return for a cancellation of license revenue, local agencies will receive annual payments from the state calculated by formula based on the growth of ownership tax.

In essence, these changes in ownership tax and vehicle fees are loans. Local employees have been complaining for years that the state’s promises to repay have reached the lost revenue by many billions of dollars.

The ongoing conflict entered a new phase last month when San Mateo County is suing the stateclaiming to have shortened the money it was supposed to receive from the change of license in 2004 because of the strangeness in the way the school areas of San Mateo were financed.

Several of the district school systems are defined as “basic aid”, which means that they only receive tokens sums of state funds, as local ownership taxes fully fund their operations thanks to the high taxable property values. This, San Matteo claims, unfairly bent the formula used to calculate the restoration of the vehicle license.

The county attaches a shortage of $ 38 million and says it would be even higher in the initial calculation of the state, but is partially modified after complaints.

“These funds are due to San Mateo County and our 20 cities,” said County Executive Director Mike Kalagi in a statement. “And instead of fulfilling its obligations, the state wants us to absorb costs.”

Although the amount laid in the suit is relatively small, it represents a much larger gap between the state and the local employees and sets an example of the confused ways in which the state continues to paper over its shaky finances rather than categorically face them.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.