Newsom and legislators withhold school funds while state blows money on pork and luxury travel

The California Teachers Association sued the state this week, asking a court to force the payment of $3.9 billion in public school support that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature withheld in the budget they enacted in June.

The money is required under a constitutional mandate, Proposition 98, that voters passed in 1988. The funds would have to be released eventually, but Newsom and legislators held them back as one of several “solutions” to close a multibillion-dollar deficit.

“We are filing a lawsuit to demand the protection of Prop 98,” CTA President David Goldberg said in a statement. “We are demanding a return of the funds that have been withheld so that our students and communities can be saved from yet another year of devastating educator layoffs and unnecessary cuts.”

Prop. 98 made the state budget the primary source of operational funds for the state’s public schools, with local property taxes a less important factor. It’s also the largest single piece of the budget, and governors and legislators have periodically indirectly borrowed from it to close gaps between revenues and spending.

The teachers union suit also addresses the $1.9 billion in withheld school aid from the previous year’s budget and repaid a year later.

The state has been coping with deficits for the past four years totaling $125 billion before this year’s budget, according to the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek. It has amassed what Petek calls a “wall of debt” to cover the gaps.

Although state and local support for schools has risen sharply in recent years, many school districts are in financial distress due to rising costs — especially for salaries — and declining enrollment. (State aid for local districts is determined largely by attendance.)

By pure happenstance, Tuesday’s announcement of the lawsuit coincided with two other revelations about state spending.

CalMatters published an article by reporter Yue Stella Yu revealing dozens of specific budget appropriations for local services and projects that were placed in a bill at the behest of individual legislators and quickly enacted just before the Legislature adjourned for the year.

The items included $29 million to renovate a gym at a Santa Barbara college in Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón’s district, $13 million for a farmers market and food innovation hub in wealthy Marin County, where Newsom lives, and $3 million to renovate the San Jose Giants’ minor league baseball stadium in Santa Clara County.

All told, the bits of pork added up to $1.3 billion, earmarked in secret with virtually no justification or public notice. And much of it went to communities such as Marin County and Santa Barbara, among the state’s most affluent, while projects in low-income communities were bypassed.

Another Calmatters article by Yu and Juliet Williams summarized a report from the inspector general of the High Speed Rail Authority that the agency had paid nearly $600,000 in unallowable travel expenses to “questionable locations that appear unrelated to state business,” including trips to gyms, a nightclub, an escape room, a tiki bar and a cigar lounge, over two years.

 “Paying for travel when it is not necessary or when it exceeds what is allowed by state regulations or the contract terms is waste of public funds and is behavior inconsistent with the Authority’s role as the steward of public resources,” the report said.

Lest we forget, the rail authority, appointed by the governor, is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a bullet train project that is nowhere near completion and whose projected costs have soared.

So, what do these three coincidental revelations tell us? It’s that the governor and legislators are withholding money from the education of children while spending huge amounts on pork barrel projects and luxury travel.

It’s what political pros call “bad optics.”