If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger intends to make good on promise No. 5 for his first 100 days in office, he had better hurry.

When he laid out his top 10 promises in a pre-election speech at Sacramento's Memorial Auditorium, he decried state employee labor agreements and said he would renegotiate them. The action, he suggested, would save California hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Excessive deals have been struck that we no longer can afford," Schwarzenegger said at the time. "In this time of financial crisis, I will renegotiate state employee contracts."

But with his own 100-day benchmark of Feb. 24 little more than two weeks off, administration officials acknowledge there's been very little substantive movement on the contract renegotiation front.

On top of that, the one big union he has singled out as "so willing to work with us" has said it has no intention of revising its contract.

"We are not reopening our contract, and whoever says that is mistaken," Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the 28,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Association, declared in a recent interview.

"What we've said all along, dating back to the Davis administration, is that we are eager and willing to have discussions about how to save the state money. But that doesn't mean we are willing to reopen our contract. That is flat wrong."

Schwarzenegger raised some eyebrows at union headquarters and at the state's Department of Personnel Administration, which normally negotiates employee labor contracts, by naming Steven Cambra, a former warden at Pelican Bay State Prison, to be the administration's point man for efforts to renegotiate with CCPOA.

Although Cambra also served a short stint as acting director of the state Department of Corrections, according to a "biographical sketch" released by the department, he has no experience as a labor negotiator.

Experienced or not, he has an enormous task ahead of him: Rod Hickman, secretary of the umbrella agency that runs the state's beleaguered prison system, has said he expects a big chunk of his agency's projected $400 million budget cut in the fiscal year that starts July 1 to come from renegotiating the CCPOA contract.

As of last week, "not one single serious conversation had been held" between the union and the administration, Corcoran said. That didn't stop Schwarzenegger, however, from insisting when he met with reporters recently that negotiations were under way.

"We are getting into the contract negotiations," he said. "So, no matter what they say, we are in contract negotiations and they are very cooperative and very positive that we can really save the state money, which is extremely important."

Jim Hard, president and labor negotiator for the California State Employees Association, said he's no more interested in renegotiating than the correctional officers union.

"I took it seriously," Hard said of Schwarzenegger's vow to renegotiate labor contracts, "but I also took it as a sign that he's not well-versed in the laws of California. You don't unilaterally get to decide you're going to renegotiate a contract. Both sides have to sit down and do that."

Hard said he can't imagine many of the CSEA's 88,000 state workers would be willing to give back any pay raises, since they already agreed last year to work one day a month for free in lieu of mass layoffs.

"It's difficult," Hard said, "especially since they're again threatening layoffs and because of his refusal to add any revenue to the budget and take a more balanced approach. That's what we'd like to see. Not more taken away from rank-and-file state workers."

At the labor organization that represents 6,000 California Highway Patrol officers, Chief Executive Officer Jon Hamm had a similar reaction.

When former Gov. Gray Davis' administration asked the CHP to renegotiate its contract last year - the agreement doesn't expire until 2006 - Hamm's first response was to send a letter that said, "No thanks."

But when the Davis administration offered to make the contract's medical insurance provisions more attractive, CHP officers agreed to take a 2.7 percent raise for the first year instead of the 7.7 percent pay raise they were due under the contract last July.

Now, with the health care package already sweetened, those familiar with the contract say it's harder to envision a second agreement.

"My whole information is that same 100-day list," Hamm said of Schwarzenegger's promise to renegotiate. "We've not heard a word. I have no idea what they're looking at, so it makes it difficult to know what our reaction might be."

Part of the problem, Hamm and others said, is that after almost three months in office Schwarzenegger still hasn't named a new personnel director. The personnel agency hasn't been involved in any of the renegotiating overtures sent to various labor unions, but administration officials say new executives to replace Davis appointees should be in place "soon."

Rob Stutzman, Schwarzenegger's communications director, said it wouldn't be fair to suggest the new administration has been slow to make good on this particular 100-day promise.

"We're not going to reopen negotiations with the same personnel that negotiated for the previous administration," Stutzman said.

"There's a process of getting our people in place and there's a process of noticing bargaining units that we want to reopen. But a lot of the bargaining units have contracts and don't want to reopen. It takes two to tango on this."

The administration began formally reaching out to state labor unions last week, telephoning representatives of nine bargaining units and asking them to meet about renegotiating existing contracts or to discuss future negotiations for contracts that expire in July.

One way Schwarzenegger intends to cut back on the cost of paying state workers is known, however: changing the state's pension system. New employees would be subject to a lower benefit than current workers, creating a two-tier system.

And Schwarzenegger, through negotiations with employee unions, wants to increase the contribution workers make toward their pension from 5 percent to 6 percent of their pay.

Like the rest of Schwarzenegger's budget proposal, the pension changes are subject to legislative approval. If the Legislature goes along, the state is expected to save $4.6 billion over the next 20 years, according to the GOP governor's budget proposal.

But it's the controversial five-year deal with the union representing correctional officers that drew the most attention from Schwarzenegger when he campaigned to recall Davis and during his first few months in office.

The correctional officers, whose union is among the biggest campaign cash contributors at the Capitol, hadn't gotten a pay raise in two years when the Legislature and Davis signed a deal in 2001 that calls for raises of about 35 percent over the life of the contract.

Schwarzenegger and other candidates criticized the contract often in the campaign. As recently as two weeks ago, at an appearance before the Sacramento Press Club, Schwarzenegger said he had a better chance of getting concessions from the union because - unlike Davis - he would never accept campaign contributions from public employee labor unions.

"And here's a perfect example of what I was talking about during my campaign, that I can sit down with them and we can negotiate now, because we don't owe them anything," Schwarzenegger said. "Not one penny. I didn't take one dollar from them for the campaign. And this way, I can sit down and do whatever is necessary to fix our prison problem."

When - and if - his administration does start serious talks with the CCPOA, it could get some unexpected help from state Sen. Jackie Speier. The Hillsborough Democrat has been holding hearings on a variety of problems within the state prison system and plans to focus on the CCPOA contract later this month.

"There is a lot in that contract we want to look at," Speier said last week. "The last governor couldn't give them enough. The first thing I want to do is shine a light on the problem, and then we'll see where we can go with it."