The potential costs of a new policy or program always factor into the legislative process — but that’s especially true when the state is facing down a $31.5 billion budget deficit.
As the Legislature completed a key milestone this week, deciding the fates of nearly 1,200 measures with significant price tags, California’s looming revenue shortfall was on the mind.
“It is a different time that we have to operate in, so it is a lens that we have to look through all the bills,” said Assemblymember Chris Holden, a Pasadena Democrat who leads the appropriations committee. “To the extent there were some real pressures that we thought we needed to address, we did.”
Holden and his counterpart in the state Senate, La Cañada Flintridge Democrat Anthony Portantino, announced today the outcome of the “suspense file,” a biannual culling of fiscal legislation. The bottleneck of hundreds of bills that are expected to cost at least $50,000 gives the appropriations committees an opportunity to consider them — and their potential outlay — as a whole.
Portantino, who sprinkled his reading of the results with trivia about California, declined to speak with reporters after, saying that he had a flight to catch.
The hearings took place less than a week after Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out his plan to close the budget shortfall. During a press conference last Friday, the governor said he was “deeply mindful” of the Legislature’s many spending requests, but urged them not to send him a litany of expensive measures that he would be forced to veto.
“We have a collective responsibility, and at the end of the day, I guess I’m the backstop,” Newsom…
Read the full article here