Brown Vows to Cut Spending as California’s Governor
California Governor-elect Jerry Brown promised to slash spending and trim the size of government in a state saddled with a $19 billion budget deficit this year.
Brown, a Democrat, said he’d “find every item of either waste or low-priority spending.” He spoke today at a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Oakland.
“I want to look for ways to organize state government to make it leaner, to make it more responsive and to make it more coherent,” Brown said.
Brown, 72, yesterday defeated Meg Whitman, 54, a former EBay Inc. chief executive officer. He will become California’s governor for a second time, three decades after he first took the job. He will manage the state with the most people in the U.S., the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate and an economy bigger than Russia’s.
California went a record 100 days without a budget until Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an $87 billion spending plan Oct. 8, sparing the world’s eighth-largest economy from having to issue IOUs for the second year in a row. The state was the last to enact a budget for this fiscal year.
Burdened Enough
Brown said he didn’t anticipate new taxes and noted voters turned down an $18 increase to the cost of vehicle registration that would have funded state parks. That signaled residents are in “no mood to add to their burdens,” Brown said.
Brown garnered 54 percent of the vote, while Whitman drew 41 percent, according to the California Secretary of State’s website. Whitman, a billionaire, poured at least $141.6 million of her own money into the campaign, a U.S. record for self- funding by a candidate.
Brown said he spoke yesterday to Whitman and Schwarzenegger.
“Meg Whitman was very gracious,” Brown said. “She congratulated me, and said she wanted to offer whatever help she could provide to help fix California.”
Brown said he would go to Sacramento tomorrow to meet with lawmakers and finance department staff.
“My message is: Get ready for hard surfaces and benches as you sit in the kind of austere environment of a very carefully put-together state government and budget,” Brown said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at avekshin@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net.
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