Late state budgets affect suppliers

"The impact is huge," says Bartels, who runs a small Ripon food distributorship that supplies state prisons. "When the state does not pass a budget, I do not get paid and I cannot pay my vendors."

The delays also affect local governments and schools, which are left wondering how much money they can expect from the state in the coming fiscal year.

"Sometimes you don't know if you have enough money to hire the staff you need," says Scott Plotkin, the executive director of the California School Boards Association.

In 17 of the last 25 years the state has begun a new fiscal year on July 1 without a budget. The delays have averaged 27 days, ranging from six days in 1978 to last year's record stalemate, when the budget wasn't signed until Sept. 5.

This year, because of the state's record budget deficit, the deadlock could last even longer, and the impact could be much broader if the state Supreme Court, in a case brought by a taxpayers' group, rules that a wide variety of state spending is barred without a budget in place.

Critics frequently blame the fact that the budget must be passed by two-thirds majorities as a major reason for the length and frequency of the deadlocks, and a group that includes several labor unions and the League of Women Voters of California is hoping to reduce that requirement.

They've taken the first step toward putting an initiative on the ballot next March to require support from only 55 percent of lawmakers in both houses to pass a budget. Also, legislators would lose their pay and expense money for each day a budget was late.

"We have for a long time felt that the two-thirds vote was not the appropriate way to pass all kinds of fiscal measures," says Trudy Schafer, the league's program director. "It really does give the minority an unfair advantage and ... sort of lets the majority off the hook" for budget delays.

Cutting the vote requirement "would dramatically reduce the likelihood of our being late," says Assemblyman John Longville, D-Rialto, who has introduced legislation that would require only simple majorities to pass budgets.

But Longville's constitutional amendment, like similar measures in previous years, is unlikely to pass because it also needs two-thirds votes and won't get support from the Legislature's Republican minorities.

"I have to give them the opportunity to surprise me by supporting it," he says. "But I have to assume they will vote in partisan fashion and it will end up having to be put on the ballot through an initiative."

Democrats have dominated both houses of the California Legislature most of the time since the late 1950s, but they've been short of a two-thirds majority in at least one house during that period.

Currently, Democrats are two seats shy of a two-thirds majority in the 40-seat Senate and six short in the 80-member Assembly.

Even if Democrats had two-thirds majorities in both houses it might not guarantee timely passage of a budget. Plotkin, a former legislative aide, remembers when Democrats had 57 seats in the Assembly -- three more than a bare two-thirds majority -- in the 1970s following the Watergate scandal.

"There were plenty of problems trying to cobble together a two-thirds vote even among Democrats because everybody had different points of view," he says.

California is one of only three states that always require a super majority to pass their budgets. The others are Rhode Island and Arkansas.

The two-thirds requirement was adopted by voters in 1933 as part of a tax reform measure.

Originally, it allowed budgets to be approved by simple majorities if state spending for non-school programs didn't increase by more than five percent. But that seldom-used exception was dropped in 1962.

Supporters of the two-thirds rule say that lowering the vote requirement to 55 percent or a simple majority would encourage more state spending and higher taxes. The initiative and Longville's legislation would allow lawmakers to approve tax increases that were part of a budget deal by the same vote required for the budget itself, either 55 percent and a simple majority.<