When Jerry Brown returned to the governor’s office in 2011, Democrats largely accepted his argument that with revenue down and deficits high because of a deep recession, the state budget needed to be as

Now, as Brown prepares for the final “May revise” of his career, some Democrats’ frustration is boiling over. In a bid to get the governor to drop his opposition to more generous state welfare benefits in his $132 billion 2018-19 budget, they’re planning to depict him as indifferent to and callous about child poverty.

The focus of the fight is the CalWORKS program, which provides cash aid to eligible families with one or more children. Household income and family size are the key factors in determining eligibility. The same factors, and whether any family members have special needs, are evaluated in setting how much help they get from CalWORKS.

But as a recent Los Angeles Times report noted, the payment scale has not been adjusted for inflation for years — meaning the effective spending power of CalWORKS’ payments is down 37 percent since 2007.

To hammer home the hardship faced by CalWORKS recipients — and to make the case for Brown accepting annual cost-of-living increases to CalWORKS payments — Assembly Democrats recently arranged for Rochella Mendoza, a 31-year-old single mother from the Bay Area, to testify before a budget subcommittee. She said the $600 she got monthly from CalWORKS couldn’t cover basic needs and worried that her son would be scarred by the “shame and humiliation” of poverty just as she was growing up, the Times reported.

While the effort by lawmakers to depict Brown as hard-hearted is new, advocates for the poor have gone after the state in general for years for — in their view — tolerating unusually high levels of child poverty. A 2011 HBO documentary (pictured) highlighted this concern with a focus on destitute families in affluent Orange County.

The Census Bureau’s alternative measurement of poverty that includes cost of living shows California as having the highest overall rate in the nation. But narrower measures have also shown high levels of poverty specifically in families with children.

PPIC: 46% of state kids live in poor or near-poor homes

A Public Policy Institute of California report from October 2017 found that 46 percent of children in the state lived in households that were either poor or near poor. The report said more than one-quarter of children met the official definition of living in poverty in counties with nearly half the state’s population, starting with Los Angeles.

The report noted that in the 59th Assembly District, based in South Los Angeles around the 110 Freeway, a staggering 49 percent of children were growing up in impoverished homes – at least those who had shelter. A January 2017 report by the KPCC PBS channel found that the number of CalWORKS families in Los Angeles County who were homeless had tripled from 2005 to 2015. The report quoted Phil Ansell, the head of the county’s efforts to help the homeless, as saying the increase was a direct result of CalWORKS cash assistance not keeping up with the cost of living.

Will such stories and data sway the governor, who has repeatedly warned that a recession is overdue and would create a massive hole for years in future state budgets?

Brown has been characteristically tight-lipped going into budget negotiations. But social service advocates see reasons for hope in the governor’s last-minute concession in budget talks in June 2016. That’s when he agreed to drop a 1996 policy that decreed families receiving CalWORKS assistance couldn’t get more money if they added a child. This led to the state providing an additional $136 or more per month to nearly 100,000 families, according to a Governing magazine account.

The November

Progressive Democrats in both the state Assembly and Senate are eager to broadly expand public services. Brown, however, has spent his second go-around as governor emphasizing the dubiousness of adding permanent new spending programs when state revenue is so volatile because of its dependence on income and capital gains taxes paid by the very wealthy.

The governor warns that even a moderate recession could lead to a loss of $55 billion in revenue over three years. Given that revenue plunged $30 billion in one year at the start of the Great Recession, the memories of the budget carnage under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are fresh, especially the huge cuts in K-12 education spending.

But the California Nurses Association and its legislative allies are signalling they’re ready for another full-on push for a single-payer health care system. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, continues to ask proponents how such a system could be funded, given that its estimated annual cost of $400 billion is more than triple the state’s current general fund budget of $125 billion. He effectively killed Senate Bill 562, the CNA-backed single-payer measure, last session, perturbed that advocates refused to offer clear explanations of how it would be funded.

Universal free preschool, health care for undocumented sought

The next most costly initiative on the table is a long-discussed proposal to provide universal free preschool to 4-year-olds. Many Democrats share former Assembly Speaker Darrell Steinberg’s view that it should be first on the list of any new state programs. Steinberg’s 2014 proposal would have cost an estimated $2.5 billion a year. More recently, the Common Sense nonprofit advocacy group has been lobbying for a more ambitious program than Steinberg’s with a price-tag of at least $5 billion a year.

Assembly Budget Committee Chairman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco – the lawmaker who so far has issued the most comprehensive proposed budget – wants to spend $4.3 billion of the $7.5 billion in additional revenue expected by the LAO, with the remainder going to the state’s rainy-day fund.

Ting’s most notable proposal is to provide Medi-Cal health care to undocumented immigrants up to age 19, at an annual cost of about $1 billion after smaller initial outlays. He also wants to increase college scholarships, restore cost-of-living increases for state benefits going to the aged, blind and disabled, and increase access to child care. Ting’s plan also calls for an expansion of preschool, but with a plan that’s less far-reaching than Steinberg’s proposal.

Under the California Constitution, the governor must present a budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 by Jan. 10. In May, after the state Department of Finance updates its revenue and expenditure forecasts, the governor’s office issues a revised budget.

Brown made few concessions during the last budget cycle. In May, he ignored the then-loud push for a dramatic expansion of state health care, but he did agree to increase salaries for child care providers and to continue funding a joint state-counties program meant to ease access to health services for seniors and low-income families.