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HERE'S HOW IT WORKS: Hill doesn't
play favorites when analyzing the state's behemoth
budget.
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli |
Last july—after weeks
of failing to get his $103 billion state budget approved—California
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called his legislative opponents
“girly men” at a shopping mall rally in
Ontario, Calif.
It may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the remark created
a furor as many Democrats, women and gay men took offense.
Meanwhile, the woman whose work helped trigger the budget
stalemate was unfazed. In the heated climate of California
budget wars, this was business as usual for Liz Hill.
Hill, ’73, is the state’s legislative analyst,
a nonpartisan watchdog who follows taxpayers’
money and makes sure it’s spent wisely. It’s
a gigantic task. California’s economy is the sixth
largest in the world, and its deficit in 2004—estimated
at more than $8 billion—is larger than many states’
budgets.
Hill is the bane of governors and legislators she finds
fiscally imprudent. In her 28 years with the state Legislative
Analyst’s Office (LAO), she has skewered both Democratic
and Republican proposals on how to divvy up California’s
annual budget, now a $100 billion behemoth.
Recently, California has been hammered by runaway energy
prices and the dot-com bust. In a speech last year in
Los Angeles, Hill noted that the state’s biggest
source of revenue, personal income taxes, dropped 26
percent in 2001-2002 alone “and we haven’t
really recovered from that.”
Nearly every summer, Hill, who joined the LAO in 1976
and became boss in 1986, finds herself in the middle
of a political death match over California’s budget.
The governor submits a proposal, Hill weighs in, lawmakers
take the governor’s proposal apart, Hill weighs
in again, and then both sides skirmish for weeks into
the new fiscal year, putting programs in limbo.
Her 52-person staff of economics professors, lawyers,
teachers, ex-journalists and ex-cops examines everything
from charter schools to health care to water privatization.
They produce a 1,000-page budget analysis and hand-deliver
a 200-page version of it to each of the state’s
120 legislators. Hill reads and signs off on every word
in the unabridged version. “We look at how the
economy’s doing, what’s going on with revenues,
do the governor’s proposals really pencil out,”
Hill says. She emphasizes that her office merely makes
recommendations to her 120 “bosses” in the
legislature to use or discard as they wish. But the
legislators take those recommendations very seriously.
In January, Hill gave Schwarzenegger’s original
budget plan a fairly clean bill of health, declaring
that it included “realistic revenue and caseload
assumptions,” although she suggested the legislature
consider a tax increase to plug a $6 billion deficit
projected for 2005.
"Someone
is usually upset with us at any given time . .
. you can't take that personally."
- Liz Hill |
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However, she criticized the governor’s plan after
he submitted a revised budget that relied on $2.6 billion
over the next two years taken from city and county coffers.
The LAO report charged that the governor’s revised
proposal lacked overall policy coherence, provided only
“short-term relief” and in the short run
imposed added fiscal stress on many local governments,
including possible cuts in services.
“The piece literally holding up the budget was
the local government piece,” says Assemblyman
Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, a chief opponent of
Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget. Hill, he says,
“armed us, as the legislature, with the data and
the arguments to be able to debate a very important
issue . . . that has a lot to do with how we grow.”
Steinberg calls Hill “one of the great treasures
of our state because she calls it as she see it—she
is not burdened with the curse of the legislature, which
is to look only at the short-term impacts of getting
something done.”
Schwarzenegger’s deputy finance director, H.D.
Palmer, takes issue with critics who charge that the
governor’s “mañana budget”
buys now while taxpayers pay later. He said Schwarzenegger
plans to streamline state government and reform the
state’s MediCal system, and that the current budget
does not reflect those savings.
Says Palmer, “If you talk to both Republican and
Democratic leaders, there’s widespread respect
for Liz. I can tell you first-hand that Liz is firmly
committed to achieving savings in state government because
I have run into her shopping at Costco on a Friday night.”
Not all greet Hill’s work cheerfully.
Former assemblyman and San Francisco mayor Willie Brown,
who pretty much ruled the legislature from the early
’70s to the mid-1990s, “hated the analyst’s
office,” recalls Sacramento Bee political
columnist Dan Walters. “He created his own shadow
analyst’s staff” to try and blunt the LAO’s
findings.
Hill allows that with 120 bosses, “someone is
usually upset with us at any given time . . . you can’t
take that personally.”
Her husband, Larry Hill, says that the hotter things
get, the cooler she is: “If we’re having
a lover’s spat, she actually gets more articulate.”
He says the same thing happens when legislators try
to intimidate her: “She gets better. She doesn’t
raise her voice in the Senate chambers.”
Hill has left a trail of broken budget dreams and sliced
away a mountain of governmental lard. Some examples:
* Gov. Jerry Brown once proposed a budget that called
for California to launch its own satellite. The LAO
said it wouldn’t fly fiscally.
* In 1978, Hill recommended that the state Department
of Justice no longer give its employees state cars to
drive. The employees, many of them attorneys, said they
needed the cars at home in case of emergencies. But
Hill found the cars were never used in emergencies.
The legislature cut $500,000 from the DOJ’s budget
and made the employees drive their own cars.
Nothing is too arcane for Hill’s sleuths. Last
year, when California was considering issuing driver’s
licenses to as many as 2 million undocumented immigrant
workers, she sent analyst Paul Steenhausen to wait in
line at 10 DMV offices in California. Steenhausen, who
sometimes went in undercover in blue jeans, found the
average wait was 80 minutes, and some customers were
waiting four hours.
In response, the governor ordered the DMV to hire 400
more staff, reducing the average line to half an hour.
Hill’s upbringing proved the perfect incubator
for her unflappable bipartisanship. Her mom, a third-grade
teacher, was a Republican; her dad, a salt salesman,
was a Democrat. She was student body president and valedictorian
at Thomas Downey High in Modesto, Calif.
She spent a year between high school and college near
the Arctic Circle, where she went to school and lived
with a Swedish family, and later won a Fulbright scholarship
to study Sweden’s transportation system.
At Stanford, she played guard on the basketball team
and majored in human biology.
Hill, who got her master’s in public policy at
UC-Berkeley, once joked that her cross-Bay education
added to her bipartisan credentials. “First you
to go to Stanford, then you go to Cal.” And when
Big Game rolls around? “You sit on the 50-yard-line.”
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