STATE BUDGET: Governor proposes tweaks to realignment

May 14, 2013
STATE BUDGET: Governor proposes tweaks to realignment
Rich Pedroncelli/AP
Gov. Jerry Brown responds to a question concerning his revised 2013-14 state budget plan during a news conference at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, May 14, 2013. Despite surging state tax revenue, Brown unveiled a revised spending plan for the coming fiscal year that is $1.2 billion lower than he projected in January.
Published: May 14, 2013; 01:21 PM
 
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Jerry Brown released a revised spending plan Wednesday that calls for tweaks to his signature effort of putting counties in charge of low-level criminal offenders, and would allow counties and the state to swap long- and short-term inmates.

The proposal in Brown’s $96.4 billion revised general fund package follows complaints from sheriffs and prosecutors in Inland Southern California and elsewhere that a combination of the public-safety realignment law and sentencing formulas has filled county jails with dozens of inmates serving sentences as long as 40 years or more, something for which jails were never designed.

In a count earlier this year, Riverside County had almost 70 jail inmates serving lengthy terms and San Bernardino County had more than 100 because of the realignment law. Statewide, more than 1,100 long-term inmates are serving their sentences in jails rather than prisons.

Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach is the sponsor of legislation by state Sen. Bill Emmerson, R-Redlands, that contains a proposal nearly identical to the governor’s. The measure stalled in committee last month after Democrats said it could increase the prison population and anger federal judges who have ordered the state to reduce prison overcrowding

On Tuesday, administration officials said the trade would leave the prison population unchanged. Prisons would send counties an equal number of prison inmates nearing release for every inmate serving a sentence of more than three years unloaded by counties.

“Is realignment a perfect surgery? No. Like everything else around here and in life, we learn from experience and we adjust accordingly,” Brown told reporters, saying his inmate-swap proposal is a “a fix” for the problem of long-term inmates in jails. Realignment has worked well overall, he said.

In other parts of the governor’s revised budget with Inland implications, Tuesday’s plan does not include state funding for the school of medicine at UC Riverside.

Supporters of the medical school say they need $15 million in ongoing state money to open the school on schedule and to maintain the school’s accreditation. The school, they say, will help increase the region’s supply of primary care physicians and serve newly insured residents under the federal healthcare law.

The quest for the UCR money will be part of budget negotiations that now begin in earnest. The $15 million appropriation also is the focus of two bills in the Legislature.

“I was disappointed but not surprised the Governor’s May Revision did not include full funding for the UCR Medical School,” state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, the author of one of the bills, said in a statement. “I am continuing my fight to get full funding for the UCR Medical School to meet Inland Southern California’s severely underserved needs for basic medical care.”

This story is developing. Check back for more updates.