After a quiet weekend the Budget Conference Committee is planning on convening this afternoon. The committee's plan, apparently, is to work through all the open issues today. Health is up early in the agenda while human service issues will be towards the end of the agenda. If time permits we will update here later in the day.

The Conference Committee has literally hundreds of proposals from the Administration and the LAO to make decisions on. The committee has 3 options: accept a proposal, reject a proposal or create a conference committee compromise. Given the short time to create compromises most observers expect the committee to accept or reject outright most proposals.

We anticipate substantial cuts across all areas of state government with some of the largest cuts expected for K-12 and higher education. But cuts are also expected for corrections, the judiciary, health and welfare programs and general government.

We anticipate that the Conference Committee will reject high profile program eliminations for CalWORKs, Healthy Families or CalGrants. But we anticipate cuts to all these areas and to IHSS and SSI. While these cuts will be a milestone in the budget process, it is likely that the committee's work will be altered in order to get the two-third votes needed.

The Saturday LA Times ran an article on how Republican votes to cut social service programs disproportionately impact Republican areas. Here's the link.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gop-poor13-2009jun13,0,5016357.story?track=rss