State lawmakers and the governor have just 12 days left to hammer out a balanced budget.
There is a 27 billion dollar hole to fill in that spending plan, and Governor Newsom wants to close part of it by slashing funding for housing and homelessness.
The governor has been pouring billions of dollars of state money into homelessness for the last few years, but now he proposes cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from those programs. He also wants to slash almost a billion dollars from programs that support affordable housing and help first-time homebuyers. Governor Newsom says these are tough times for the state budget so he has no choice but to trim programs he has previously supported. As you might imagine, there is stiff opposition to his proposals, from a wide range of organizations, and many of them descended on the State Capitol recently to express their displeasure with the governor’s revised budget plan and call for the restoration of this funding.
For more on this, KCBS political reporter and the host of "The State of California" Doug Sovern, along with KCBS Radio anchors Bret Burkhart and Patti Reising were joined by Eddie Carmona, Campaigns Director for PICO California, which is the largest faith-based community organizing network in the state. It’s a nonprofit grass roots group of more than 500 congregations, that works toward racial and economic justice.
