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California Lawmakers To Forfeit Pay After Budget Veto

Kate Rooney |
June 21, 2011 | 2:50 p.m. PDT

Executive Producer

Brown vetoed the legislature's budget last week. (Freedom To Marry via Creative Commons)
Brown vetoed the legislature's budget last week. (Freedom To Marry via Creative Commons)
The California legislature will go without pay until a new budget is approved, the state controller said Tuesday.

“My office’s careful review of the recently-passed budget found components that were miscalculated, miscounted, or unfinished,” controller John Chiang said. “The numbers simply did not add up, and the Legislature will forfeit their pay until a balanced budget is sent to the Governor.”

With the fiscal year to begin on July 1, Chiang had warned legislators they could expect not to receive paychecks if they missed last week’s deadline, according to Reuters.

Governor Brown vetoed the budget Wednesday, just a day after the legislature sent it through for his approval.

“The budget I have received is not a balanced solution,” he said last week. “It continues big deficits for years to come and adds billions of dollars of new debt.”

Brown went on to praise his fellow Democrats for their “valiant efforts” in working towards a balanced budget “in the absence of Republican cooperation.”

But the budget presented, he said, contained “legally questionable maneuvers, costly borrowing, and unrealistic savings.”

Under a measure passed by California voters in 2010 in an effort to prevent the budget delays that have become the norm for the state, lawmakers are required to forfeit their own pay and living expenses until they can present another bill to the governor.

This marks the first instance in which this “On-Time Budget Act” has been applied.

Republicans objected to Brown’s proposed budget due to a proposed extension of tax increases, prompting Democrats to draft their own budget in hopes of garnering Republican support.

The vetoed budget called for $89.75 billion in state spending while approximating just $87.9 billion in revenue, according to Chiang’s official statement.

Education was underfunded by at least $.13 billion, and hundreds of millions of anticipated revenue was to come from sources for which bills have yet to be passed by the legislature.

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