Dear Governor Brown,
You have always been an advocate for improving the educational opportunities for the youth of California. Your record of increasing educational funding and founding charter schools truly showed that you understand the value education plays in today's society. That is why I was disheartened to hear that you are holding K-12 education hostage in an attempt to fix your $9.2 billion budget deficit.
Your dangerous game of chicken wrongfully relies on the voters approving $7 billion in temporary tax increases in November or three weeks will be slashed from the K-12 school year. Threatening to cheat our children of their educational future is not the way to ensure that you get the tax hikes you want.
Instead of endangering educational funding, your administration should look at total state spending and prioritizing spending based on actual outcomes.
One way to do this is by reconsidering your October veto of performance based budgeting. This legislation, which passed the California legislature unanimously, would have required state agencies and departments to develop annual "goals, target outcomes, and performance data" to be submitted with their regular budget requests. The intended result would have enabled you and the legislature to better determine spending priorities based upon actual performance outcome data. This new budget system would provide legislators the opportunity to make more informed decisions about allocating limited resources.
In 2003, I worked with Washington Governor Gary Locke to solve a $2.8 billion budget deficit without raising taxes by using performance based budgeting. He called it "Priorities of Government" and won a national award for the new budget system.
At State Budget Solutions, we know the complexity that solving California's budget crisis presents to your administration and the state legislature. However, playing games with our children's education is not the answer. State Budget Solutions urges you to create real budget solutions that are not based on gimmicks, threats or illusions. I think we can all agree that California taxpayer deserve better than that.
We would be glad to work with your staff on implementing performance based budgeting.
Sincerely,
Bob Williams
President, State Budget Solutions
www.StateBudgetSolutions.org
