Editorial: Gov. Brown saves for rainy day, UC hung out to dry
By Editorial Board
May 18, 2014 11:29 p.m.
The May revision of Gov. Jerry Brown’s state budget persists in squirreling away money into a rainy-day fund while California’s college students stand under a cloud of looming student loan debt.
Ignoring the University of California’s request for more substantial increases to funding for the public university system, amounting to an additional $120.9 million, Brown allocated $1.591 billion into his rainy-day fund in his proposed 2014-2015 budget.
By investing so heavily in a stabilization fund, Brown is neglecting the UC and continuing a decade-long tradition of state divestment from higher education.
To Brown’s credit, the goal of ensuring fiscal stability for state services is an important one, especially given the deep cuts to state services resulting from the most recent economic downturn. But the idea of stocking a rainy-day fund while the University continues to languish is hypocritical on more than one level.
First, the Great Recession tilted the financial burden of higher education onto California students and parents. In failing to buffer the UC’s bottom line, Brown is professing to act in the interest of California taxpayers while ignoring this segment of the population.
Second, more than half the extra money requested by the UC would go to servicing its pension liability, a cost that will continue to inflate if not paid down. The state should help the UC with this line item, as it does with the California State University and California Community College systems. Doing so would represent a more concrete commitment to fiscal responsibility than feeding Brown’s nest egg.
In a recent report, the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan public policy research group, called Brown’s choice to refuse modest increases for the UC and other social programs a “false choice between fiscal responsibility and reinvestment in public services and systems.”
Even if Brown fully met the demands of the UC and provided a full $120.9 million increase for the University system, he would still have well over $1 billion for his rainy-day fund. That $120.9 million would be about 7.5 percent of the current allocation for the rainy-day fund, which would leave plenty of fiscal cushioning for the state.
In 2012, Brown tied Proposition 30, a desperately needed tax increase, to UC funding. He threatened an automatic $250 million cut to state funding for the UC if the tax initiative did not pass, and promised the proposition would free up funding for higher education and social services.
Now, Brown is obligated to follow through on that promise.
Given the fact that students shoulder a heftier cost than the state to support the UC, now is a more critical time than ever for the legislature to step up and start funding public education the way it was meant to be funded: through state revenues.
