Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a plan to balance the state’s budget today, but only after cutting hundreds of millions of dollars more from health services including those for child welfare and people with AIDS.
Schwarzenegger”s last-minute cuts totaled $489 million. He also penciled into the plan today another $167 million in what he called “cost savings” – money saved in the general fund from accounting maneuvers.
“This budget is kin of like the good, the bad and the ugly,” Schwarzenegger said at the ceremony in his capitol office. Good are the reforms in the budget, bad are the cuts and ugly are the additional reductions he made Tuesday after the Legislature sent him a $23 billion deficit-reducing plan that fell short of the $26.3 billion estimate that the governor’s finance experts had been using.
Included in the changes are:
— Nearly $80 million in cuts to child welfare services that will impact the number of social workers available to investigate abuse claims.
— $52 million in cuts to AIDS services, eliminating all state support except for medication and epidemic surveillance.
— $50 million for the Healthy Families program, which will result in children being removed from the program.
— $6.2 million for state parks, which will likely mean 100 state parks will close.
— $500 million set aside to create a reserve in the state’s general fund. The governor originally had asked for a $2 billion reserve.
The plan adopted by the Legislature Friday included $15 billion in cuts and $11 billion in accounting gimmicks.
This leaves the state with a spending plan of $84.5 billion for the current fiscal year, which began July 1.
