California meltdown

This column took a vacation last week, but if you were hoping its absence indicated the meltdown had ended, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Sept. 2: The state Senate votes to approve a bill to raise revenues for the Healthy Families children’s health-insurance program by creating a 2.35 percent tax on the gross premiums of companies that manage Medi-Cal insurance plans. The companies, which will get out from under a 5.5 percent federal tax in October, support the bill. The senator for this area, Sam Aanestad (R-Grass Valley), votes no. As many as 600,000 low-income children are threatened with losing their health insurance due to budget cuts.

Sept. 4: Woo-hoo! The state issues the last of its 449,241 IOUs today, to a Sacramento cab company for $41.60. The IOU program began on July 2.

Sept. 4: The state Assembly passes the bill funding the Healthy Families program, 58-0. Gov. Schwarzenegger says he will sign it.

Sept. 6: The twice-monthly furloughs at Chico State University could cost the county $10.2 million in lost business revenue annually, most of it in Chico, the Chico Enterprise-Record reports, citing data compiled by David Gallo, the lead economist at the Center for Economic Development. Some 70 jobs also will be lost. Gallo’s report does not include the additional $25 million in other cuts the university is absorbing.

Sept. 9: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California’s 800 clinics and community health centers have seen a 50 percent increase in newly uninsured patients this year.

Sept. 9: A Bureau of State Audits report on the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation indicates: While expenditures have increased by almost 32 percent in the last three years, the inmate population has decreased by 1 percent during the same period. Overtime is so prevalent among correctional officers that more than 8,400 of them earned more than the top pay rate for officers two ranks above them. Nearly 25 percent of the inmate population is incarcerated under the three-strikes law—at a cost of $19.2 billion over the duration of their imprisonment.

Sept. 10: A San Francisco Superior Court judge orders an immediate end to furloughs for all 7,900 State Compensation Insurance Fund employees. Their union, SEIU Local 1000, promises to sue for back pay.

Sept. 10: State Controller John Chiang releases August figures indicating a decline in revenues of $237 million, nearly half the state’s $500 million budget reserve.

Sept. 10: A U.S. district judge orders the state to halt $117 million in scheduled cuts to the state’s adult day-care program, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, citing that they could cause “irreparable and imminent harm” to program participants.

Sept. 11: Unable to craft bipartisan deals on water and renewable energy, lawmakers end the legislative session by agreeing on a scaled-down version of an inmate-reduction plan, one that fails to achieve the $1.2 billion in savings called for in the July budget revisions. The bill saves just under $1 billion. The state faces a Sept. 18 deadline for submitting a prisoner-reduction plan to a three-judge federal panel that has ordered a reduction of 40,000 inmates within two years.