YOUR DUES DOLLARS AT WORK BUDGET WATCH
NEWSOM RELEASES INITIAL 2025-26 FUNDING PLAN by CCA Vice President of Government Affairs Kirk Wilbur The California Constitution requires the Governor to submit a proposed budget to the Legislature each year by Jan. 10. Governor Gavin Newsom usually revels in announcing the proposed budget himself, providing an animated and rather in-the-weeds overview of his initial spending proposal in front of the cameras, aided by nothing more than a flashy PowerPoint presentation. This year, however, the proposed budget’s release looked much different. Newsom was absent from the proceedings – while he’d initially planned to be at former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in Washington, D.C., the Governor was instead stationed in Los Angeles County overseeing the state’s response to the devastating fires that ignited three days earlier. Instead, Department of Finance Director Joe Stephenshaw stepped in, seated in front of a thick binder to provide a more subdued overview of the Administration’s fiscal plan. Newsom’s spending plan for Fiscal Year 2025 – which runs July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026 – totals just over $322 billion, and Stephenshaw projected a small budget surplus of just $363 million. While that surplus is extremely modest,
it is better than expected coming on the heels of two consecutive deficit years and with long term projections forecasting shortfalls into 2030. Despite the rosierthan-expected budget outlook, the proposed budget “maintains the planned withdrawal of approximately $7.1 billion from the” Budget Stabilization Account – or the State’s rainy day fund – that was factored into last year’s budget outlook. To fund climate-related programs, the proposed budget in part relies on the $10 billion Climate Bond (Proposition 4) approved by voters in November, proposing to tap $2.7 billion of those funds in Fiscal Year 2025. Of that $2.7 billion, Newsom proposes spending more than $1 billion on “Safe Drinking Water, Drought, Flood & Water Resilience,” $325 million on “Wildfire & Forest Resilience,” $134 million on “Climate Smart Agriculture” and the remainder on other climaterelated expenditures. While the proposed budget is short on groundbreaking General Fund investments in climate programs, it importantly would not cut any additional funding from the $54 billion appropriated in the 2022 budget to be spent over a period of five years, a sum which is now closer to $45 billion after cuts in recent years. Wildfire and Forest Resilience Of the $325 million in Proposition 4 funds dedicated to wildfire and forest resilience, the greatest sum, $82.2 million, would be allocated to fuels reduction and forest conservation initiatives under CAL FIRE’s Forest Health Program, aimed at “reducing fuels, reintroducing beneficial fire, restoring degraded areas, and conserving threatened forests.” $59.1 million of the state’s wildfire and forest resilience budget would go to CAL FIRE’s Wildfire Prevention Grants Program to provide fire prevention grants to at-risk communities, and $33.4 million would be earmarked to prioritize wildfire resilience on 3.8 million acres of state-owned lands. In addition to Proposition 4 funding, Newsom proposes spending $39.3 million in General Fund
18 California Cattleman February 2025