Our view: State workers taken hostage in budget fight

In the latest sordid scene out of Sacramento, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is essentially holding a gun to the heads of state employees in an attempt to force California legislators to compromise on a budget for the new fiscal year that began a month and a half ago.

In fact, the governor is already trying to pull the trigger to temporarily slash pay for many employees and suspend it completely for others. He's being thwarted so far by state Controller John Chiang, who contends the state has enough money to meet its needs into October event without a new budget.

Chiang, by the way is a Democrat. Schwarzenegger is a Republican. That's no coincidence, because partisan party politics are a big reason for the budget debacle.

You couldn't tell the Democrats from the Republicans among the people lining Lake Earl Drive outside Pelican Bay State Prison on Wednesday, however. They were simply civilian prison workers protesting the governor's warped concept that their pay should be held hostage until those quarrelsome legislators work out their differences.

People like Sharon Roberts, a single mother from Crescent City who teaches at the prison. She's faced with the prospect of receiving IOUs instead of paychecks as she tries to make ends meet and care for her disabled daughter.

Even the prison's correctional officers are in Schwarzenegger's line of fire. He wants to temporarily cut their pay to the minimum wage, somehow figuring they don't deserve the exemption he's proposed for state employees working in public safety.

There are many such inequities in the governor's hostage-taking approach to budget negotiations. It would disproportionately victimize communities that are heavily dependent on state wages. Pelican Bay is Crescent City and Del Norte County's largest employer with more than 1,500 workers. If those people are temporarily ordered to work for little or nothing, our already economically depressed region would take a huge hit.

Schwarzenegger is far from the only villain in this unfolding drama. Legislators have long known the state government was facing a huge fiscal deficit. They've played a partisan game of chicken instead of doing what they were elected to do: Bear down and find a compromise solution.

Is there any reason the current sense of urgency—amplified by the governor's gun-waving—couldn't have been felt before the new fiscal year began July 1? That, after all, was the date when government jurisdictions were constitutionally required to have a new budget in place. The county Board of Supervisors followed the law. So did the City Council, the School Board and the Harbor Commission.

In the eyes of many Democratic and Republican legislators, violating the state constitution is apparently preferable to the hard work of compromise. Because they won't do their jobs, the governor now wants to stop paying state employees even as they continue to do theirs.