by Karl Kurtz
Yesterday's Sacramento Bee has an interesting story, "State's unruly budget pattern," about the frequency with which state courts side with plaintiffs in lawsuits against California's budget settlements. In addition to large legal fees for the state, these decisions often mean that budget cuts made by the legislature to balance the budget in one year have to be paid back with interest in later years.
In the article, California's Legislative Analyst, Elizabeth Hill, is quoted as saying that in 30 years in Sacramento she can't remember a single year in which the state was not sued over the budget. While no doubt our biggest state often has the biggest problems and usually the biggest numbers on everything, this statement still surprised me. I am not aware of that much litigation over budget decisions in other states.
[Addendum, 10/15/07. Liz Hill responded to this post with an email message saying that what she told the reporter "was that I could not think of a time in my more than 30 years that we were not tracking pending litigation for its effect on the budget. This is different than the tone of her article and the thrust of your commentary." I certainly agree that this is different from how the reporter and I paraphrased the remark and apologize to Liz for any misinterpretation. Nonetheless, the basic point that California appears to experience more budget litigation than other states appears still seems valid.]
When I asked our NCSL budgeting expert, Arturo Perez, about the article, he said that the California experience seemed unusual to him, too. He asked legislative staffers in the next two largest states, Texas and New York, about their experience with litigation over the budget. His contacts in those states both told him that although they have had to deal with lawsuits over school funding, spending limits, corrections and a few other areas, most of the lawsuits have not dealt with the budget process or actions taken by the legislature directly tied to the execution of the budget.
Arturo and I speculate that California experiences more lawsuits on the budget not just because of its size, complexity and diversity but also because of the initiative process that has put many constraints on what the governor and legislature can do in writing budgets.
We would be interested in hearing from other states on the frequency of lawsuits against the legislature's budget decisions. Please add a comment below or click on "Contact us" in the right column and send us an e-mail.
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