For four Sacramento-area lawmakers, the debate over the most severe budget crisis in California's history involves much more than dollars and cents.

It's about the tension between deeply held political beliefs and compromise. It concerns the role of government when there's no generally accepted formula for how much government is enough.

Will people die if the state stops helping them? Will business shut down if the state raises taxes?

They claim to honestly disagree with their counterparts across the aisle but suspect that some in the other party are driven more by political considerations than by good-faith debate. They talk about a lack of trust.
All four profess frustration with the deadlock. But somehow, despite their unhappiness with the lack of a budget, these four and 116 colleagues seem far from a deal as the beginning of the fiscal year looms Tuesday.

And while each side can make eloquent arguments for the rightness of its cause, no lawmaker yet has described the steps that will lead to a signed budget.

"I don't know what it will look like right now," said Assemblyman Guy Houston, R-San Ramon, whose district includes Elk Grove.

None of the lawmakers relishes the consequences of not having a budget, ranging from cutting off payments to companies that provide goods and services to the state to shutting down community college campuses. But they weigh those consequences against the havoc they believe would result from a bad spending plan.

"Making a deal for the deal's sake got us here," said Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas. "You tell me what honor there is in what we've done."

In the week before the start of the fiscal year, The Bee conducted extensive interviews on the budget standoff with four legislators -- Houston and Oller on the Republican side, and Sen. Deborah Ortiz of Sacramento and Assemblywoman Lois Wolk of Davis, both Democrats.

None of the four is a party leader involved in closed-door budget negotiations. But their votes on the spending plan will carry equal weight.

The two parties are locked in an impasse over whether the state should resort to tax increases to help bridge a $38 billion shortfall, in part to pay down $10.7 billion of the deficit over five years.

The lawmakers come from diverse backgrounds. Houston and Wolk are freshmen. Ortiz and Oller were elected to the Legislature seven years ago and then followed parallel tracks from the Assembly to the Senate.

Wolk was a teacher and the mayor of Davis; Houston a mortgage banker and the mayor of Dublin.

Ortiz, born and raised in Sacramento, is a former member of the Sacramento City Council who worked as a legislative aide and vice president of a public relations firm. Oller, raised in the Mother Lode, runs a building industry business that he started in 1981.

The contrasts continue in their approaches to the budget crisis.

Wolk, working on her first budget, bemoans the lack of a political middle. She took part in meetings of a bipartisan group of about 18 Assembly members. Although she didn't endorse the compromise budget developed by the group's two leaders, she called it a good start that, with a few changes, she could support.

"Unfortunately, the debate is driven by and controlled by the extremes, either those who will never cut and would like to increase programs versus those that will absolutely never increase revenue no matter what," she said.

"In our caucus, if you suggest cuts, people use terms like 'People are going to die. How can you want to kill people?' Meanwhile, from what I read, the extremes in the Republican caucus threaten people's future careers."

Earlier this month, Senate Republican leader Jim Brulte said he would campaign against lawmakers in his party who voted for tax increases.

Wolk blames what she sees as extremism on the redistricting that left most members in safe seats, the lack of an open primary that would let voters of all parties take part, and term limits.

By contrast, Oller believes that compromise in recent years has become a euphemism for Democrats getting their way on the budget.

"We cannot do what we've done in the past, and do what Democrats refer to as a 'compromise' whereby we accept tax increases and continue the spending," he said. "We're going to have another disaster deeper and worse than this year."

Oller said he believes that politicians should be driven by immutable principles rather than the latest polls.

"The will of the majority can be wrong," he said. "It can be wrong practically, and it can be wrong morally."

Besides, Oller said, polls on the budget show that voters want mutually exclusive outcomes: They don't want cuts in services, but neither do they like the taxes that would pay for them.

"At some point, you have to do the right thing," he said. "We've been doing the wrong thing for four years."

Oller concedes that not having a budget will have consequences. But those are outweighed by the damage that a business-unfriendly budget with tax increases would do to the private sector, he said. The free market provides the revenue that supports government, he said. Protecting it is more important than making a budget deal.

"I've already resolved in my heart that, faced with that choice, that's what I would do," he said.

Oller still smarts at the ridicule he says he suffered from former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, when he suggested several years ago that the state's revenue windfalls would not last. And his eyes still flash when he talks about last year's budget, when Sen. Maurice Johannessen, a Republican from Redding, bargained with Democrats and cast the decisive vote in the Senate. Johannessen was later appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to be secretary of veterans affairs.

"He is gone, and let me tell you, it was a great day for the state of California when he left," Oller said.

Faced with that kind of uncompromising attitude, Assembly Democrats recently fanned out across the state in an attempt to apply pressure on Republicans by taking the debate to their home districts. Wilma Chan of Alameda and Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach went to Oller's district to address the Placerville City Council in the Sierra foothills.

The floor of the council chambers is brown-flecked linoleum. A handmade sign points to the kitchen. It's a world away from the stately granite of the Capitol dome, but the terms of the budget discussion sounded very much the same.

Chan and Lowenthal were greeted outside by protesters carrying homemade signs such as "Spend Not, Tax Not," and "Shrink Government."

Inside, council members listened politely as Chan and Lowenthal laid out what they saw as the options. The lawmakers said they wanted to open a dialogue, not force a plan down anyone's throat.

Lowenthal did mention, however, that solving the budget crisis with no new taxes would cost Placerville government as much as $700,000 a year -- a major chunk of an operating budget of about $6.7 million.

Some of the 20 or so people at the council meeting were skeptical of the Democrats' conciliatory tone.

One protester, Karen Smith of Garden Valley, said that tripling the vehicle license fee, announced the day before, would cost her household $500. The increase, likely headed for a courtroom battle, was triggered by the state's fiscal woes.

"This means I, as the inveterate bookworm, can't purchase about 35 books this year," Smith, wearing a visor emblazoned with the American flag, told the City Council. "I can't make three trips to Southern California to see my elderly mother and my young son. It's one vacation I can't take. It's five charitable organizations I will not be giving to."

"I understand there are going to be services cut," she said, "but you have to understand something: This is my money you're talking about that I worked very hard for, and I have been watching it spent frivolously."

Smith's stance has been embraced wholeheartedly by Republican legislators.

And what rankles Deborah Ortiz is that colleagues like Oller, in her view, have gotten away with advocating no tax increases without having to fill in the details about what vital services they would cut.

"We haven't found a way of having him be accountable," she said.

"In many ways, it's easier to have a simplistic philosophy of no new taxes, government's too big, and that there's fraud and waste in most of these programs," she said.

At the same time, Ortiz concedes that Democrats have failed to convince Republicans that they are committed to long-term measures to control the growth in major health care and social service programs.

"We have to take responsibility," she said. "We could do a better job to demonstrate our commitment and sincerity to do that over time."

Sincerity is at the heart of the budget debate. Both sides see political manipulation lurking across the aisle. Are Republicans stonewalling on the budget to add fuel to the attempt to recall Davis? Are Democrats kowtowing to the public employee unions that support their campaigns in the name of protecting vital government services?

"Underlying it, there's a lack of trust," Houston said.

He traces that all the way to the top. The governor, he said, doesn't have the kind of relationship with legislative leaders that would allow him to broker a deal as past governors have. People in Houston's district are shocked when he tells them he has never even met Davis.

Some recent events have exacerbated the distrust, he said.

The Assembly this month approved a bill that revoked nearly $80 million in tax exemptions for farmers and spent it on health insurance for farmworkers.

The tax breaks were a crucial part of the budget deal two years ago, allowing Democrats to coax a handful of GOP members to vote for the spending plan. Many Republicans saw the reversal as a stab in the back, even though two years earlier they had condemned the members of their caucus who dealt with the Democrats.

"Why would anyone entertain negotiations when it can be reversed the next year?" Houston asked.

So the impasse continues. But as the start of the fiscal year comes and goes, the Legislature no doubt will start feeling greater pressure from the public to come to some sort of agreement.

"The public is far ahead of us," Wolk said. "The public knows it wants a combination of cuts and it wants some revenue, and it talks about some rollover (of the deficit). The public is ready to do that. We're not."