Chico and Butte County are looking at $2 million cuts, Paradise will have to chop $900,000, and Chico State University was unpleasantly surprised by budget the state Senate passed over the weekend.

Butte College, however, got some good news.

Chico City Manager Tom Lando said the new state budget looks like a $2 million hit for the city's budget - a hit it can ill afford.

He likened the budget to the ones suffered in the 1990s. During that period, $1 million was taken from local coffers to help the state.

The state has told Chico to expect about $750,000 of this year's cuts to come back in 2006, Lando said. But he isn't holding his breath.

Although he hadn't actually seen the budget yet and it hasn't passed both houses of the Legislature, the city's top manager said he expects to avoid hiring new people in the near future. Even replacing the people who depart was somewhat in doubt.

As the city continues to grow, that hits services.

The Senate may be patting itself on the back for handling the issue, but it has really only delayed it. The really big debts have yet to be dealt with, he said.

"He's right, said County Chief Administrative Officer Paul McIntosh. "This budget does not contain any structural reform. It's very similar to budgets we saw in the 1990s ... It's continuing to ignore the problem."

But there are "some major surprises that directly affect county government" including a total of $933,000 cut out of the Sheriff's Office budget by state slices to grant programs that the county relied upon for years.

The grants paid for bodies to work in more rural counties, as well as training and equipment for law enforcement officers.

With them gone, McIntosh said he didn't know if the sheriff would have to cut positions.

"It's completely out of left field. It has not been discussed in previous versions" of the budget, he said.

The county's $2 million cut comes from a $24 million pool of money the county actually controls. The rest of the county's spending has strings attached.

"There are a lot of pluses and minuses in the budget, we're still trying to add them all up," McIntosh said.

"We still have to filter out directly what it means to Butte County, but it's not good news," he said.

Butte County Sheriff Perry Reniff has "a lot of problems with that budget" and he realizes he's not the only one. "There's a lot of problems in there for MediCal and agriculture."

However, the elimination of the Rural and Small County Sheriff's grants, from which Butte County receives $500,000 annually, the cut to the Citizen's Option for Public Safety (COPS) grant and the elimination of the corrections officer training grants to local law enforcement are baffling to the first-term sheriff.

He wonders how the cuts to law enforcement can be justified in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The main thing is, I have to look at where the cuts will hit. How do you operate a department this size without an IS (information systems) staff? You can't. I can't cut employees without getting into critical staff losses. I just can't do it."

The Butte County Sheriff's Office funds three deputies and the entire information systems staff with the Rural and Small Counties grant funds. It also pays for a half-time information analyst who enters missing persons and other information into the database.

The grant itself is only two years old, Reniff added. It began because the Legislature recognized that rural counties needed assistance.

"We rely heavily on it. Rural counties get hit real hard in this budget," he added. "In my experience, law enforcement always gets hit hard."

A proposed $16.3 million cut to the COPS grant jeopardizes the Sheriff's Office ability to replace vehicles as they get old and wear out. The state budget will also eliminate a high tech grant used by the Sheriff's Office to upgrade equipment and computers.

The war on methamphetamine manufacturing also takes gets hit - $5.5 million hits actually. Butte County receives $100,000 which goes towards one full-time deputy and equipment to participate in the North State CalMet program. The loss of funding would eliminate Butte County's share of the program.

Officials in Paradise are anxiously awaiting decisions from the Assembly.

As it stands, the Senate version will hurt Paradise to the tune of nearly $800,000, said Town Manager Chuck Rough.

That figure could go higher if a plan to have cities and counties "loan" three months worth of vehicle license fees to the state is upheld. The action could cost Paradise about another $313,000.

Rough said the town will lose out on $750,000 in sales tax revenue if the state reduces the share it automatically allocates to cities from 1 percent down to one-half percent. There is still talk, Rough said, that the state will "back fill" that lost revenue with a shift in property tax allocations.

On the plus side, Rough said it looks like a $100,000 state grant the town uses to replace police vehicles will be left intact.

"No matter how it looks in the final form, this budget is going to hurt us," Rough said.

While the figures are still much less than fully understood, Pat Blythe, the director of the Butte College Foundation, says the college is "pleased" with the budget passed by the Senate.

The Senate's budget lifts the budget for the California Community College, which includes 72 different districts like Butte, to $4.97 billion from the $4.77 billion proposed by Gov. Gray Davis in May.

While some individual segments of the statewide community college budget will take bigger hits, under the Senate's proposal, overall the Senate plan adds just about $200 million for the colleges, compared to the governor's proposals.

Fees at community colleges, under both the Senate's proposal and the governor's plan, will go from the present $11 per unit to $18 per unit. None of the money from the fee hike goes to the schools, but rather to the state general fund.

In the California State University system, which includes Chico State University, the outlook on the Senate budget is not as positive.

"At this point, it looks like the Senate budget includes another $15 million cut on top of the $260 million net cut from the governor's January budget, plus the $69.5 million legislative action that had already been taken in June/July," according to Colleen Bentley-Adler, director of public affairs for the CSU.

"So, the total - at this point - is a net $345.2 million cut to the CSU's General Fund budget. That amount equals about a 13 percent decrease in our $2.6 billion General Fund budget.

"At this point, we are still reviewing the Senate plan, so the $345.2 (million) may be low. We are waiting to see how the Assembly will act. Whatever the final number, the CSU is expecting a significant reduction to its 2003/04 budget," she wrote in an e-mail to the Chico Enterprise-Record.

Earlier this month, in anticipation of a range of budget cuts, the CSU Board of Trustees approved a 30 percent increase in student fees.

Starting this fall semester fees for full-time California resident undergraduates will go from $786, to $1,023, a hike of $237 a semester.