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After Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, his re-election campaign quickly dispatched an e-mail to reporters, quoting his claim to have sharply reduced spending and brought the budget much closer to balance. Characterizing his $222 billion infrastructure improvement plan as "investing in the future" but "not spending," Schwarzenegger added, "Spending we have reduced. Remember what I said. We have cut down the structural deficit by 75 percent. It was expected to be $16.5 billion. We're now at $4.7 billion. That is great progress ... no matter what anyone says." Schwarzenegger thus exposed to a national audience a...

SACRAMENTO - Less than two months after giving $10,000 to an initiative campaign committee tied to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a well-connected private prison company was tentatively awarded a $20 million contract by the state of California to operate a San Joaquin Valley correctional facility. Altogether over the past two years, GEO Group has donated $68,000 to various Schwarzenegger committees, according to campaign reports. Officials with the state prison system insist there is no tie between the donations and the contract, which is part of a broader strategy to use less-expensive private beds to relieve severe overcrowding in the 33 state-run...

SACRAMENTO — The Schwarzenegger administration has quietly moved to reopen two private prisons a year after mothballing them — and after a company that stands to profit retained consultants close to the governor and his inner circle. Administration officials attribute the reversal to an unexpected rise in the number of prisoners. Prisons Department critics point to the private prison company's lobbying. The administration has decided to reopen two facilities, one of which is a 224-bed prison in the Central Valley town of McFarland. A Florida company ran the McFarland facility for 15 years until Dec. 31, 2003, when the state...

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has quietly taken steps to reopen two privately run prisons in Kern County -- with no-bid contracts -- that were shut down as a cost-saving move barely a year ago. The Department of Corrections said they were needed because of an unexpected increase in inmates. But the move sparked angry outbursts from critics who questioned the prison population figures and said lobbying by former administration insiders persuaded the governor to reopen at least one of the facilities. A Bakersfield man who ran one of the closed prisons sharply criticized the department for taking the...

BERKELEY – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today (Thursday, Nov. 4) announced the appointment of Tom Campbell, dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, as the new director of the California Department of Finance. Campbell, an economist and lawyer who served five terms as a Republican congressman representing the Silicon Valley and also served as a California state senator, will take a leave of absence from his university post and is expected to begin his new job Dec 1. "Tom is a brilliant economist with intricate, first-hand knowledge of public and fiscal policy who shares my commitment to...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - The state's finance director, a strong conservative voice in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration, has resigned after 11 months on the job. Donna Arduin could leave as soon as Friday, according to the governor's office. The cabinet position will be temporarily filled by Arduin's deputy, Michael Genest, until the government finds a replacement, officials said Wednesday. Schwarzenegger has called Arduin his resident "genius" and praised her "machine"-like work habits, Arduin, 41, who left her imprint on the governor's initial budget, is the first major political appointee to leave the administration, and her departure could show a shift in...

LOS ANGELES - Cleaning up the budget mess in state government will require additional measures to boost revenue as well as economic growth, a key Schwarzenegger administration official said Wednesday. "We can't grow our way out of" the so-called structural deficit, Donna Arduin, director of the state Finance Department, told an audience of about 250 gathered for the release of the influential quarterly economic forecast from UCLA's Anderson School of Management. In a rare acknowledgment of the intractability of the state's budget problems, Arduin said that the administration must find "ways to continue to grow revenue."

The revised budget Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last week would, on paper at least, balance spending and revenues for the coming year. It would also allow Schwarzenegger to present another budget next January that looks balanced for the following year. But without an economic boom that neither the governor nor anyone else anticipates, or more spending cuts that he has yet to lay out, Schwarzenegger's latest plan would not dig California permanently out of the persistent imbalance between tax receipts and spending that has plagued state finances since the dot-com collapse. The governor's finance director, Donna Arduin, insists that the...

Today: March 09, 2004 at 13:40:50 PST Rescuers Search for Solo Female ExplorerBy MATTI HUUHTANENASSOCIATED PRESS HELSINKI, Finland (AP) - Rescue helicopters searched Tuesday for a female explorer who was feared lost on a journey to the North Pole, a spokesman for the expedition said. Finnish adventurer Dominick Arduin, 43, hoped to be the first woman to reach the North Pole alone and unaided. She was last heard from Friday, the first day of her trip, when she called from Arctic Russia on a satellite phone, said Reijo Hietanen, whose advertising company in Finland is responsible for updating her Web...

<p>Donna Arduin has a quaint idea about government finance: She thinks every state program should have specific goals laying out what it is trying to accomplish and clear measures to help the public determine whether those goals have been achieved.</p>

<p>SACRAMENTO, Calif.--For the past five years, California government has spent $23 billion more than it has taken in. Over the past five years, while revenues have increased by 25%, state expenditures have risen by 43%. If government had simply spent at the same rate that California's economy has grown, the state's budget would be balanced today. Instead of resolving imbalances, the previous administration and the Legislature chose to borrow $25 billion from future state budgets in order to create or expand programs that the state couldn't afford. In health and human services alone, significant program expansions have totaled $1.3 billion.</p>

<p>If Californians saw the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a great opportunity to fix California's broken fiscal system and its dysfunctional government, they're likely to be sorely disappointed.</p> <p>What they seem to be getting instead is warmed-over Davis proposals, rejected ideas going back to Gov. Pete Wilson, among them his "King Pete" initiative that would give the governor sole power to cut spending in tight times, and Alfred E. Neuman "what, me worry?" borrowing plans that Californians will be paying off for the next 30 years.</p>

If anyone should learn from the recall election, it is voters. Just about the time we think state legislators have found a constructive lesson in California's recall election, they prove us wrong again. Take, for example, a recent display of petty tyranny. Petty tyrants, according to Carlos Castaneda, come in three subcategories: pinches tiranos, pinches tiranitos, and pinches tiranitos chiquititos (the teeny weeny kind). We'll leave it to you to judge the category befitting behavior in last week's special session. Members of both political parties qualify, as columnist Jill Stewart makes clear (on the Comment page). The Republicans started it...

<p>In a little-noticed provision of his initial budget proposal, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is asking the Legislature to deny welfare recipients a cost-of-living increase that would have been triggered by his rolling back of the state car tax.</p> <p>The proposal came to light Wednesday as lawmakers started asking questions about the budget package Schwarzenegger unveiled the day before and held a strained first meeting with the governor's finance director.</p>

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Donna Arduin, a budget official known for cutting billions in social services in Florida under Gov. Jeb Bush, has been named California's new finance director. Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger also announced Monday that former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has agreed to become the state's new education secretary. The appointments are the first of more than 150 the new governor is expected to make in coming weeks. Arduin is engaged in an audit of California's budget for Schwarzenegger — a project considered critical to creating the new governor's spending plan. "I have a great deal of confidence...

<p>Donna Arduin draws little attention as she walks the halls of the Florida State Capitol - most folks in that state don't know her name or the important role she plays in state government.</p> <p>But the budgets she helps craft for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush - slashing taxes and state spending alike - have helped him and the Republican Party implement their conservative vision.</p>

(snip)Arnold Schwarzenegger formed a politically diverse transition team Thursday, appointed a finance specialist to lead an immediate audit of the state's beleaguered budget and vowed to appoint Democrats to his Cabinet. (snip) His 65-member transition team includes prominent figures from across the political spectrum -- ranging from Republican George P. Shultz, secretary of state in the Reagan administration, to San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., a liberal Democrat. (snip)