The Real Losers in the Capitol Budget Game

Although Dolores Mission is just a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles, it resembles a frontier church, a California mission built quickly and simply so the priests could begin the Lord’s work without delay.

The mission church is a single-story stucco building painted a utilitarian light brown, with a tall bell tower constructed of steel pipe. On the other side of an asphalt-covered yard, in a brightly colored but equally simple building, is a preschool. Across the street is the mission school, a large ball field and a playground. Just to the south is the public housing project where many of the predominantly Latino parishoners live.

The schools and the playing field point up the importance of children to this parish, the city’s poorest. It was the children who were the subject of a demonstration at the church Tuesday evening to protest Gov. Pete Wilson’s huge budget cuts.

One of the speakers talked about the proposed reduction in Aid to Families With Dependent Children. She explained how a friend in the projects told her that sometimes she didn’t have food in the refrigerator for the kids at the end of the month. She said cuts in education will make life in the projects even more difficult. “Most of our students don’t graduate from high school,” she said. “They (the teachers) just keep them quiet and that’s it. They go from the first grade to the second grade to high school without learning anything.”

This woman had a powerful message. But her voice was faint if measured against the well-connected, rich and sophisticated forces at war in Sacramento over the much-diminished state treasury. For all the influence that she and the other parishoners have over the budget process, they might as well be out on the real frontier in a remote community isolated from the centers of power.

For in Sacramento’s budget fight, there are the losers--and the real losers.

The poor are among the real losers. While they are represented by social welfare organizations that employ lobbyists, these representatives don’t have the clout of lobbyists available to big corporations and private industry trade associations.

Nor do other budget cut victims. I saw that when I talked to Laura Remson Mitchell, government issues coordinator for the Multiple Sclerosis California Action network.

Mitchell, working out of her San Fernando Valley home, is organizing the disabled to protect programs that are important to them, such as in-home care, from budget cuts. It isn’t enough to have a lobbyist in Sacramento, she said. You also have to make sure the lawmakers know you have a constituency. The disabled, she said, find it hard to fly to Sacramento for hearings. And for the people at Dolores Mission, it’s impossible.

Compare these inadequate resources to those of the well-connected.

An example is how influential interests are fighting for redevelopment, a scheme conceived about 40 years ago to buy slums and replace them with new housing and productive businesses. A coalition of Republicans and Democrats, arguing that redevelopment is not a high priority item in today’s severe recession, has proposed using $400 million in redevelopment money to help make up the deficit.

Redevelopment means big bucks to developers and many other businesses and they joined with their allies in city government to protect their funds.

The first step was to put out a barrage of information. Last week, I ran into a representative of the California Redevelopment Assn., representing city redevelopment agencies, going from one legislative office to another with carefully prepared memos warning lawmakers about how their districts would be hurt. It takes researchers and computers to gather this sort of information, a process that is often too expensive for representatives of the poor.

Second, there is the constituent barrage. Mayors, council members and local business interests with a stake in redevelopment are flying to Sacramento. Such appeals count with lawmakers, who need the support of local government officials in their election campaigns.

And finally, there are campaign contributions. Those who profit from redevelopment--land developers, real estate companies, attorneys, financial houses and banks--all contribute to legislative campaigns.

In the end, these redevelopment agencies may not win. The recession-caused deficit is so great that everyone stands to lose something.

But so far, the agencies are still in the game, powers at the negotiating table. The parishoners of Dolores Mission , on the other hand, were losers from the start. Legislators always assumed programs for the poor would be cut. Dolores Mission never had a place at the negotiating table.

That’s what happens to the real losers in the Capitol budget game.