As measures fail, plans sought

With five of six special ballot measures decidedly defeated Tuesday night, city and school leaders are bracing for deep cuts while local state lawmakers gird themselves for another turn at the budget.

Assemblymen Van Tran and Chuck DeVore and Sen. Tom Harman agreed that voters sent a powerful message to Sacramento to start cutting the budget, something the trio of Republicans have championed throughout the state’s financial crisis. DeVore and Harman said they were willing to consider Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed sale of the Orange County fairgrounds if it made sense and could preserve the fair, while Tran tilted strongly against it.

Meanwhile, Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are staring down $5.8 million and $3.4 million in cuts from their city budgets, respectively, if the state borrows money from local governments as Schwarzenegger said it would do if voters rejected the propositions.

Newport Beach Mayor Ed Selich said the city should first look to its reserves to cover the money the state takes because the state is required to pay it back in a few years. Cutting that much money from the city’s budget now would likely be noticed by residents, he said.

“In the short term, the failure will probably have a negative impact on the city because it’s pretty apparent that the state will come and raid the city’s coffers, but maybe in the long-term it will help because the state will have to sit down and get its act together,” Selich said.

Costa Mesa has much less money in its reserve than Newport. Mayor Allan Mansoor wanted the propositions to fail, saying that they were irresponsible, but he thinks the state should make up the lost revenue by cutting spending more instead of borrowing from local government.

“They have not even begun to make anything that comes close to reasonable cuts,” Mansoor said. “They can make cuts; they shouldn’t take it from the cities.”

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District hasn’t had to lay off any teachers or jettison major programs, but if billions more in state funding are taken away by the state the district will have to make more noticeable cuts, said School Board President Dana Black.

“We’re not getting any clear-cut information. We have to wait and see because we don’t know what [the state will take],” Black said.