Assembly Panel Fails to OK State Budget : Legislature: Partisan battle over welfare spending portends bitter fight in lower house. Chairman sends Wilson’s plan to floor without recommendation.

SACRAMENTO —  Portending a bitter fight over Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed $56-billion budget, the Assembly Budget Committee failed to approve the spending plan Wednesday, as Democratic lawmakers tried to soften Wilson’s welfare cuts and Republicans worked to make them more extreme.

By a parliamentary maneuver, however, Budget Committee Chairman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) sent the document without a recommendation to the full Assembly, which will debate its merits Friday.

Meanwhile, in the state Senate, the Budget Committee approved its version of the budget over Republicans’ objections. It made several changes in Wilson’s budget, including eliminating the governor’s proposed 15% income and corporate tax cut. The full Senate is expected to take up the budget today.

The Legislature is trying to complete its work on the spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 by a June 15 deadline, which is rarely met. The budget must clear the Legislature by a two-thirds vote--54 votes in the 80-member Assembly and 27 votes in the 40-member Senate. The constitutional deadline for approving the document is July 1.

“I’m not sanguine about timetables in terms of when we’re going to move this thing to the point where we can get a [Wilson] signature,” said Assemblyman Charles S. Poochigian (R-Fresno), the Assembly Budget Committee’s vice chairman. “We have to reach broader consensus. Somehow, we’re going to get to that. The system is such that forces will drive us to an accord.”

So far, there is little movement to such an accord.

In past years, the competing Senate and Assembly versions of the spending plan were thrashed out in a conference committee composed of senators and Assembly members. That will happen this year too. But complicating matters, the Assembly is split with 39 Republicans, 39 Democrats, a lame-duck Speaker and much dissension.

On Wednesday, after spending more than four hours debating the Assembly version of the budget, Budget Committee member Jim Cunneen (R-Cupertino) concluded, “It’s going to be a long, hot summer.”

Cunneen had tangled with anti-abortion conservatives in his own party who attempted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Cunneen also split from his party by voting with Democrats in favor of funding housing for people with AIDS.

“It portends that politics will be paramount over public policy,” Cunneen said. “This should have been a relatively easy budget. The revenue stream is fairly healthy. The dollar gap to get balanced is fairly small.”

Rancor is so deep that Assembly Republicans boycotted the budget subcommittee that worked on health and welfare spending. The subcommittees finished their work last week and sent their parts of the budget to the full Budget Committee, where partisan hostility spilled into the open several times Wednesday.

Republicans killed Democratic efforts to increase aid for homeless people by $13 million, to pay $251 million for Medi-Cal dental and acupuncture treatments, and to restore $69 million in prenatal care for pregnant women who are illegal immigrants.

Democrats responded by defeating Republican attempts to limit welfare payments to no more than the amount recipients would be paid if they worked for minimum wage; deny a day’s welfare payment to families for each day a child in the family is truant, and to cut state funding for methadone treatment of heroin addicts.

“I wouldn’t suggest there was any particular strategy,” Poochigian said of the Republican moves. “It had the effect of putting everyone on notice that these Republicans aren’t necessarily any more pleased with this budget than Democrats are.”