The Governor Signs the Budget but the Work Continues…

By Rebecca Gonzales, Director of Government Relations and Political Affairs

As you may have heard, Gov. Brown signed the state budget shortly before the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1. The final budget did include some victories for low-income Californians, but it fell short of the agenda put forth by NASW and other advocates for the poor.

On a positive note, the budget did establish a State Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income Californians, which will raise many people above the poverty line. We have advocated for this policy change through AB 43 (Stone) and SB 38 (Liu). The final budget also included money to cover undocumented immigrant children from low-income families in the Medi-Cal program. This policy is part of SB 4 (Lara), which was one of our Lobby Days bills. This is a significant victory and is a major step toward providing “health care for all.” The budget also set aside $26.6 million to fund increased health care costs if the courts uphold President Obama’s executive order to allow parents of U.S. Citizens or legal resident children to remain in the country temporarily.

K-12 education was the biggest winner in the budget but there were also increases to adult education and career technical education, two programs that are often neglected. The UC and the CSU system received modest increases and will hold tuition levels flat. Cal Grants were also boosted under this budget. Another victory was the addition of 16,000 subsidized child care and preschool slots. The child care increases were a priority of the Legislative Women’s Caucus; although the increase was less than asked for, it was still significant.

The budget also begins to implement the “continuum of care” reform in order to improve services to foster children. A total of $17.7 million was included in the budget in order to train and recruit foster parents, an issue that we actively supported. Money was also provided to the Foster Youth Services Program, which is designed to improve the educational achievements of foster youth. Another high profile issue was the roll back of the 7 percent cut to IHSS hours for the In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program. This program enables low-income seniors and people with disabilities to stay in their homes.

One of the biggest disappointments in this budget is that the Governor did not agree to eliminate the Maximum Family Grant (MFG) in CalWORKs. As you may recall, this policy is also included in SB 23 (Mitchell), another one of our Lobby Days bills. Although the Governor did not include this policy in his budget, we are still working to pass SB 23 in order to force the Governor to reconsider his stance once the bill reaches his desk. Other disappointments included not increasing grants for SSI/SSP recipients and not increasing CalWORKs grants or reversing some of the policy changes made to this program during the recession. We had hoped to reinstate Cost-of-Living increases to the CalWORKs grants and to stop the 24-month clock, which prevents many recipients from receiving full CalWORKs benefits after this time period. The budget did include $15 million for the CalWORKs Housing Support program but advocates had hoped for twice that amount.

Advocates for people with developmental disabilities were also disappointed when the budget did not reverse a 2006 rate freeze, which supports payments for services to this community.  We were also unhappy to see that the budget did not restore so called “optional” Medi-Cal services that were cut in recent years, such as full dental services for adults, audiology, incontinence cream and washes, optician/optical lab, and speech therapy.

Lastly, the 10 percent reduction in provider rates to most health services was not reversed. Only dentists saw a reversal of this cut. LCSWs were subject to the most recent provider rate cuts in January 2014 and these were not reinstated.

The work on the budget continues in two special sessions called by the Governor. These sessions run concurrently with the current legislative session and have already begun. One session focuses on our deteriorating roads and highways and the other session is focused on health and human services. The health and human services special session is focused on a tax on managed care organizations which is set to expire because it does not conform to federal guidelines. This tax has helped the state support and draw down federal funds for the Medi-Cal program. The federal funds save the state almost $1 billion in state general fund spending that is currently used for other state spending. Once an alternative tax is put in place, besides Medi-Cal, it will also help support the roll back of the 7 percent cut to IHSS hours and the increases in provider rate payments for services for those with developmental disabilities. It is also hoped that new revenues can increase all health care provider rates, including those for LCSWs.

Since the budget has been passed, state revenues have come in stronger than were previously forecast. The challenge for next year is for us and other advocates to pressure the Governor to accept less conservative revenues estimates and use realistic estimates in order to fund a reversal of recession era cuts. It has been a very slow process to reverse cuts that have devastated low-income communities, but we will continue to advocate for investments in disadvantaged communities.