The Victims of Sacramento’s Budget Deal

SACRAMENTO —  We ought to lock Gov. Pete Wilson and state lawmakers up for a night in the emergency ward of County/USC Medical Center.

Put them in the midst of the gunshot and stabbing victims, the crack crazies, and the men and women hovering near death from heart attacks and diabetic comas. Let them share the fears of patients, nurses and doctors that the next person through the door could open fire.

That’s the only way California’s biggest county, site of one of America’s worst urban riots, will get help from state lawmakers.

I thought of this after trying to figure out why Los Angeles County and other urban counties are getting such a bad deal in the state budget.

I figured out part of the answer before I stepped into the Capitol. These state pols, even those from poor areas, are so isolated from reality that they might as well be in another universe.

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My feeling was confirmed when I walked down the third-floor Capitol hallway Monday afternoon and found my way blocked by a pack of men and women leaving a committee hearing on medical care. These were not representatives of the sick but lobbyists for insurance companies, physicians and other economic interests that shape the health care industry.

It is no wonder that there is a tendency for legislators to be more in touch with lobbyists than with the public. This point was illustrated later in the afternoon when Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier) and lobbyists for the tobacco industry and Los Angeles County, desperate for money, began cooking up the devil’s deal of the century.

The tobacco industry would agree to raising the cigarette tax 15 cents a pack with much of the money going to L.A. County. In return, the Legislature would take away cities’ power to pass no-smoking ordinances. That would kill Los Angeles’ new ban on smoking in restaurants, reversing one of the tobacco lobby’s greatest defeats.

The fact that the county is willing to participate in such an unholy deal shows that the supervisors are just as bad as the legislators. In fact, the supes share some of the responsibility for the county’s bad situation because of their own inept lobbying.

In presenting his budget, Wilson made it clear that state aid to local government would have to be reduced because of the recession. This was especially bad news to Los Angeles County and the cities within it. The cities, however, were able to negotiate with Wilson and the Legislature and reduce their loss. Los Angeles city, for example, will lose only

$23 million in state aid, compared to roughly $300 million in Wilson’s first budget.

L.A. County, however, ended up roughly $300 million short. That was less than what Wilson originally proposed, but still a big hit.

While City Controller Rick Tuttle, City Council President John Ferraro and council Finance Committee chairman Zev Yaroslavsky slogged the Capitol halls seeking help for L.A., the supes behaved in a fashion that has earned them the nickname “The Five Little Emperors.”

They insisted the county be spared any hit. Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) said at his news conference Tuesday that Board of Supervisors chairman Ed Edelman demanded, “Don’t touch Los Angeles County. Take it from other people.”

Assemblyman Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) told me about arranging a meeting between Brown and Edelman during one of the long Assembly sessions. “I said, ‘This thing isn’t going to go,’ ” Polanco said. He asked Edelman, “ ‘What’s the alternative? Give it to me. Let’s go in and negotiate.’ They had no alternative.”

Even one of the county’s staunchest supporters, Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), said, “It (the county) is not the best defendant a counsel could get.”

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Bad tactics, however, were not the only reason for L.A. County’s loss. Even the most skilled lobbying might not have saved it this year.

The county had an unpopular agenda. It is stuck with caring for a huge number of the poor--welfare recipients, foster children, patients in public hospitals and community health clinics. There was not much room for these urban needs in the budget crafted by the Republican governor and the Democratic Legislature.

Their agenda was that of the middle-class voters who live either in suburbs or suburban-like urban enclaves such as West L.A. or the San Fernando Valley. Prominent among them are Riordan Democrats who elected L.A.’s new Republican mayor.

As we saw in that election, crime prevention and personal safety are prime concerns. So the prison system benefited from another year of increased appropriations, its requests as free from scrutiny as the Pentagon’s during the Cold War.

But there are real victims of the Capitol’s wheeling and dealing. You can find them in the county’s emergency wards--the sick and the dying.