National Alliance For Healthy Communities

Every so often, America embarks on a project so audacious that it hardly seems possible. Prime examples: the top-secret Manhattan Project that made the first operable atomic bomb, the construction of the country’s interstate highway system starting in the 1950s, and President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to land men on the moon.

These government-sponsored projects often arise during times of political or economic duress, and so it is today with the $4.5 billion of seed money for a nationwide “smart electricity grid” inserted in the economic recovery package that was approved by Congress shortly after President Barack Obama took the oath.

The leadership is pinning much of its hopes for America’s long-term economic renewal on a nationwide, interconnected system of smart electricity meters and sensors that would increase energy efficiency, reliability, and also encourage “green” technologies like wind and solar generation and hybrid cars.

It won’t be an easy feat. There are parallels between the country’s attempt to build a new electricity network and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, said Jim Marston, Texas regional director of the Environmental Defense Fund.

“NASA knew where they were trying to get and they knew where they were, and so after the goal was announced, they spent a little while figuring out the path to get there. Shortly after that, they actually put the engineering on the ground,” Marston said.

Government’s Pivotal Role
The smart grid, Marston said, is still in the planning stage, but more smart grid test projects are under way at the local level, in places like Miami; Austin, Texas; Massachusetts; and Southern California. State and local governments have facilitated many of these projects in partnership with nonprofits or technology vendors.

In April, Miami launched a $200 million smart grid project called Energy Smart Miami, with the goal of connecting almost all homes and businesses in Miami-Dade County to a smart grid by 2011. The project is being driven by the Florida Power & Light utility company, supported by General Electric and Cisco Systems. Much of the project will be funded by Obama’s economic stimulus package.

Massachusetts is signing off on a few communities’ smart grid pilots, which are mandated by the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act. In one such test, 15,000 smart meters will be installed in homes in Worcester, Mass., by National Grid, a London-based electricity generator.

In Austin, Texas, the municipally owned utility company will finish deploying smart meters to the city’s homes later this year. And a public-private initiative that includes the City Council has been formed to study how to best use the smart meters to transform Austin’s energy infrastructure.

And Southern California Edison, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., will install 5 million smart meters in its coverage area by 2012. Edison estimates that the smart meters will save peak power consumption that’s the equivalent of one big power plant. The move toward smart grid is being motivated by California’s renewable energy portfolio standard that requires electricity companies to get at least 20 percent of the power they distribute from renewable sources by 2010.

What’s a Smart Grid?
Though regulators, politicians, vendors and environmentalists haven’t come to a consensus on what exactly constitutes a smart grid, one of its core features will be “smart” electricity meters that integrate IT. Smart meters will be installed in homes, businesses and public buildings
- virtually anywhere there’s a wall socket. Known in the power industry as “advanced metering infrastructure,” a smart meter sends a constant stream of data back to the utility companies.

From the distribution side of the equation, a smart grid would give utilities much greater control, and the ability to minimize power outages and catastrophic failures. Many utility companies today don’t have the IT on their grid to automatically detect where power is knocked out. Th
ey still rely on phone calls from affected customers. In addition, the smart grid would eliminate manual meter reading, which means no more trips into residents’ backyards. In the future, an interconnected web of sensors could monitor the electricity grid and solve load-balancing issues and other problems before they cause an outage.

“They could actually do switching of the network remotely to first identify the outage, then switch around the outage, thereby lessening the number of people who are affected by the outage,” said Guerry Waters, vice president of marketing and strategies for Oracle’s Utilities Global Business Unit. “Understanding where that needs to occur and being able to do it quite rapidly would be advantageous to the electric industry.”

From the consumer side, homeowners would conceivably save on their bills via a new class of products that would rely on two-way communication. Today a refrigerator can’t “speak” to the electricity grid – communication, therefore, is only one way. But someday, powered by the grid’s intelligence, a washing machine or thermostat could be programmed to only turn on when citywide demand is lowest. This could be achieved by redesigning the appliance itself or installing “smart plugs” at electrical sockets.

To make this new consumption model profitable, utility companies might adopt what are called “demand response” pricing models that charge users more per kilowatt-hour during peak demand and less when the electrical grid isn’t burdened. Utility companies are already testing several prototypes of online, Web-based dashboards that give homeowners a near real-time look at how much electricity each appliance in their home is consuming, and the ability to turn appliances on and off based on that information.

A utility company itself could also turn off infrastructure in a home, and the possibilities extend beyond electricity, Waters said. “One that was very clear that [Oracle] talked about to the municipal water groups was leak detection. The other would be the ability to do automatic remote connects or disconnects, or restrictions on the water. … The last one is having prepaid metering.” Smart metering could also identify water abusers during droughts, he said.

In the long term, the smart grid is also expected to help electricity generators make better use of renewable energy, like wind power and solar panels. The world’s heightened awareness of global warming – and America’s political will to cut down on imported oil – is expected to open up the proverbial floodgates for renewable energy. The U.S. economic stimulus package, by itself, is expected to spur an installed national capacity of wind power that’s 67 percent greater than it would otherwise have been, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The issue at hand is that in the future, electricity generation is expected to be more decentralized and intermittent than it’s traditionally been, when the bulk of electricity came from huge coal-fired power plants and nuclear reactors. Wind farms and solar panel arrays will be sprinkled across the country, and the smart grid will efficiently manage an electricity supply that’s incoming from all directions, which isn’t possible today.

Also, since wind and solar are intermittent power sources – they can start and stop abruptly – the smart grid would give utilities much-needed data about where the sun and wind is, so they could make informed decisions about when to fire up a backup power plant to meet peak demand.

And if hybrid cars and electric vehicles ever hit the streets en masse, they could plug into the grid, too.

Finally the smart grid would be built on an IT backbone via hardware and software contained in sensors. Affixed to key junctures, like transformers and substations, these sensors would collect data and quickly correct potential problems. It remains to be seen if this information would be transmitted over power lines, proprietary-use networks, wireless technology or the Internet, Waters said.

“Today there is actually two-way communications going on in the electrical grid, but it’s usually over some very protected circuitry and communications that are guarded very closely,” he said. “So the idea now is that the utility industry will open up to have one common way to communicate with all the devices of the smart grid.”

So in its simplest form, the smart grid will be composed of smart electricity meters, sensors and a grid that draws power from a system of generators that’s more decentralized than it is today. The trick will be building that system atop today’s antiquated grid, which can’t be discarded outright because it can’t be turned off.

Old and Always On

If Thomas Edison, who’s credited with inventing centralized distribution of electricity, were to travel from his era in the early 1900s and arrive at present, he’d probably recognize many components of the modern-day U.S. electricity grid, writes author Nicholas Carr, in his newest book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. On the other hand, Edison’s contemporary Alexander Graham Bell – who invented the telephone – would be baffled by modern-day telecommunications.

“The interesting thing is that, by and large, the electricity grid in the U.S. is kind of the last of the ancient industries that has not yet been completely revamped,” Tony Erickson, global utilities director for EDS, a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard. “So this whole concept of smart grid is something that people have been talking about for 20 years, but we’re just now kind of getting there.”

In other words, the electricity grid is like a 100-year-old legacy system that’s been left in the dust by telecom and the Internet. But it’s not as cut-and-dry as replacing an old computer system, because turning off the electricity grid isn’t an option and large-scale power outages can’t be tolerated. When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 struck the Eastern seaboard and left 50 million people in the dark, the biggest power outage in North America’s history cost the economy at least $6 billion.

The power industry and government regulators recognize that coming quickly to agreement on standards for the smart grid’s equipment and IT will speed its construction, Erickson said. But the country can’t wait for those standards to be written, Erickson said, because by the time they’re approved, the technology – the smart grid – would be outdated.

“Several communities and organizations – government, private and commercial – are forming [smart grid] standards boards, and just like the battle between the Blu-ray and [high-definition] DVD format war, we’ll see which ones win out,” Erickson said. “Eventually I’m confident we will have open standards, because those standards will be what spur entrepreneurial people to create the technology that’s going to help us drive this thing forward. So we’re kind of building it in-flight, and we have to keep the lights on while we do this.”

In the meantime, communities like Austin are launching their own smart grid projects.

In December, a coalition that included the Austin City Council; Austin Energy, the city-owned utility company; the University of Texas; the city’s chamber of commerce; and the Environmental Defense Fund announced the Pecan Street Project, an initiative to redesign every facet of Austin’s energy infrastructure. A main focus of the project will be to figure out how to take advantage of Austin’s smart meters.

The project will attempt to add more distributed renewable energy in Austin than currently exists elsewhere in the U.S., dramatically reduce the amount of energy that’s consumed, and shift the energy that’s consumed to be more coincident to the time that renewable energy is available. In addition, Marston said the stakeholders want to create a new business model that will allow electric companies to thrive – rather than just survive – in an environment in which less electricity is being sold, and distributors own less of the electricity that’s being used.

“A big part of the project is smart grid, but it’s not only smart grid. It’s smart appliances, smart plugs as well as smart meters,” Marston said. “The idea is we will use all of these technologies to dramatically reduce and shift load, and use consumer choice and even real-time rates to help that work.”

The government side is what makes the project possible, he said.

“The municipal utility company, Austin Energy, is fairly unique because the board of directors is the City Council, so it’s the same folks who also do land-use planning, zoning and building codes,” Marston said. “So I think many of the things we’ll be doing will not be directly at the utility, but putting a building code in, for example, that says all new homes, with a few exceptions, will have to have solar hot water heaters in them. For instance, we’ll probably say all new parking garages in them will have to have discharging for plug-in hybrids.”

Secretary of Transportation Rau LaHood recently made available $1.5 billion in TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) discretionary grants for capital investment in surface transportation projects. Grants will be awarded on a competitive basis to projects that have a significant impact on the nation, a region or metropolitan area and can create jobs and benefit economically distressed areas.

The grants can range from $20 million up to $300 million to support high impact transportation projects. Secretary LaHood can waive the minimum grant requirement for beneficial projects in smaller cities, regions or states.

The solicitation published in the Federal Register provides clear criteria for the department to make merit-based decisions on the new discretionary program.
Primary selection criteria include contributing to the medium – to long-term economic competitiveness of the nation, improving the condition of existing transportation facilities and systems, improving the quality of living and working environments through livable communities, improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the safety of U.S. transportation facilities.

The Department will also give priority to projects that are expected to quickly create and preserve jobs and stimulate rapid increases in economic activity, especially projects that will benefit economically distressed areas.
Applications for TIGER discretionary grants must be submitted by September 15, 2009, from state and local governments, including U.S. territories, tribal governments, transit agencies, port authorities and others.

WASHINGTON, DC – House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (MD) released the following statement on President Obama’s health care reform to a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin:

“President Obama brought a strong case for health care reform to a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin-the same case that has resonated with so many Americans all across the country. The President’s argument was persuasive; but even more convincing is the reality that Americans see around them every day with families and businesses struggling under the weight of rising costs, the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and the uncertainty of many who have health insurance, but stand just one diagnosis away from bankruptcy.

“Both the House and the Senate are working hard toward our goal of passing a reform bill this year that will increase choices for Americans among a variety of high-quality private and public health insurance options, and ensure that if you like the insurance you currently have, you can keep it. We believe it will also lower health care costs, expand access to high-quality care, and preservation of patient choice.

“President Obama also identified health care costs as the prime contributor to our nation’s poor fiscal health. I agree, and I will continue to advocate for a health care reform proposal that makes the hard choices necessary to bring costs down.”

A Dose of Reality: Myth vs. Fact on Health Reform

In an effort to obstruct the comprehensive health care reform that Americans want, Republicans have resorted to spreading false information about Democratic proposals to lower costs, preserve and expand patient choice, and assure access to quality, affordable care for all. Americans want solutions, not the same old partisan politics intended to preserve the status quo.

See below and CLICK HERE for Myth vs. Fact sheet on false Republican claims regarding Democratic proposals for reform.

GOP MYTH: Health reform means fewer choices for Americans.
FACT: The House proposal will increase choice among an array of high-quality private and public health insurance options. Most importantly, if you like what you have, you can keep it. More Americans will have access to greater choices in doctors and plans by taking away the insurance industry’s ability to deny coverage and care.

GOP MYTH: Health reform means bureaucrats will ration health care.
FACT: The House proposal will expand and improve the availability of quality health care for all Americans, not ration it. Under this proposal, doctors, nurses and patients will make medical decisions, not big insurance companies or the government. Republicans content with the status quo want to leave patients at the mercy of big insurance companies that make decisions to protect profits not patients.

GOP MYTH: Health reform means raising taxes, or making coverage more expensive.
FACT: Under the status quo, middle-class families pay an enormous “hidden tax” of nearly $1,100 per year to provide care for the uninsured and underinsured. The House proposal will end this tax by containing overall costs and expanding access to affordable care for all Americans. Additionally, the House proposal invests in reforms to contain the costs of health insurance overburdening businesses, families and the federal deficit. Republicans can either continue to be the “Party of No” and defend the status quo that is costing American families and businesses more every year, or they can be part of the solution.

GOP MYTH: Health reform means Americans will be forced out of their current plans.
FACT: The House proposal builds on what works – the employer-based system – while giving every American the peace of mind of knowing that their health needs will be covered by insurance. No one will have to worry about being denied insurance based on a pre-existing condition, or being without coverage if their employer drops coverage, they lose their job, or change employers. Republicans make this claim based on a study of a proposal that is nothing like the House proposal.

GOP MYTH: Health reform means individuals will be forced to buy insurance they can’t afford.
FACT: Millions of Americans cannot afford insurance today or are locked out of the system because of a pre-existing condition. The House proposal emphasizes shared responsibility among individuals, businesses and the government and helps make coverage affordable and available to all. Affordability credits will be available to help low- and moderate- income working families afford coverage, regardless of the plan they choose.

GOP MYTH: Health reform will force businesses to cut jobs and squeeze small businesses.
FACT: All businesses will benefit from insurance market reforms and a high performing health system that will reduce costs of healthcare. The status quo is unsustainable for businesses. Under the House proposal, employers will continue to offer their employees healthcare or contribute towards coverage. Certain very small businesses would be exempt from this requirement. With tax credits and a reformed market that ensures access to affordable coverage, small business owners and their employees will have new options to purchase affordable health insurance that are not available to them now.

GOP MYTH: Health reform that builds on Medicare and Medicaid will only hurt the programs’ long-term sustainability, and cost state and federal governments more.
FACT: Health reform is a critical first step toward containing healthcare costs for business, individuals, and the federal government in Medicare and Medicaid. By eliminating wasteful overpayments to private plans under Medicare, reforming how doctors are reimbursed, and creating new incentives for coordinated, high quality care we will extend Trust Fund solvency and improve Medicare for generations to come.

The state of California has been granted $1.1 billion by the Department of Energy (DOE) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and many California cities are hoping to capitalize on an opportunity to boost their energy efficiency because of it.

Of that $1.1 billion, $351.6 million will go to local governments for energy efficiency efforts through the new federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. Local governments with a population of more that 30,000 are currently in the application process for their piece of the pie.

Those with less than 30,000 are awaiting information on the competitive grant process. Applications are due on June 25 and the DOE is looking for projects that create jobs, meet the objectives of the program and are using the money for eligible activities, said DOE spokeswoman Jen Stutsman.

“If an application doesn’t do one of those things, we will go back and forth with these local governments until we can get a plan that we can approve” Stutsman said. “Our goal, absolutely, is to get these funds to the states and city governments.”

For many city councils, the price of democracy is that moment of peak fatigue, after deliberations have gone on too deliberately. A rule of thumb, when the meeting goes late, the quality of discussion is not great.

For that reason, many city councils have rules that put a fence around how late a meeting can go. Tempers were short and angry words were exchanged when a recent Berkeley meeting went past midnight and more members of the public wanted to be heard on the topic of a draft of a city’s Climate Action Plan. At the end of the meeting, bleary council members were unsure if they were voting on a resolution to extend the voting on amendments to the Climate Action Plan.

Most California cities wrestle at one time or another with the proper way to close discussion and vote on issues before council members become punchy. Often this is expressed by putting a time limit on speakers. Most cities have a three- or five-minute limit on speakers. In Berkeley, this limit is two minutes.

At one time Berkeley council meetings started with a “lottery” in which five people’s names were drawn out of a drum, out of all who wished to speak on non-public hearing matters. After some people objected, the city received a legal opinion that the method was illegal. If less than 10 residents have signed up to speak, they get two minutes each. If it’s more than 10, they get one minute.

The Berkeley council policy guide has this rule:

No council meeting shall continue past 11:00 pm unless a two-thirds majority of the Council votes to extend the meeting to discuss specified any motion to extend the meeting beyond 11:00 pm shall include a list of specific agenda items to be covered and shall specify in which order items shall be handled.

Sometimes it’s enough just to raise awareness.

After three years of drought that has left the state’s biggest reservoirs well below capacity, water agencies up and down the state are using methods to cajole customers into conserving California’s most precious commodity. The Association of California Water Agencies reports that 62 agencies statewide have implemented voluntary conservation measures and 32 have imposed mandatory water restrictions. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which accounts for a third of the state’s water supply, stands at 66 percent of normal.

The two biggest reservoirs in the state, Shasta and Oroville, are well below their average storage at 76 and 71 percent, respectively. Water purveyors around the state are spending millions of dollars convincing their customers that they need to conserve water. Some are issuing for blatant water wasting and many are imposing drought rates that discourage high usage. In most cases, consumers are getting the message.

In Los Angeles, water conservation teams in clearly marked cars patrol the streets on the lookout for water wasters, the thoughtless few who and when they aren’t supposed to or flooding the gutter by overspraying. Violators get a warning the first time – but after that could be hit with a ticket. Repeat offenders could be dinged up to $600 for ignoring previous warning.

So far, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 3.8 million customers have cut back by 5 percent of their water use, still short of the percent goal. Starting June 1, outdoor irrigation will be limited to Mondays and Thursdays with no watering allowed between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.. The rate system will reward customers who conserve and penalize those who don’t. “We have no choice but to make conserving water the law,” says Nahai, the CEO and general manager of the LADWP. “Cutting back on water use is now our civic duty.”

In the Northern California city of Novato, customers served by the North Marin Water District who are caught washing down the sidewalk, no automatic shutoff on their hoses or overwatering, are issued a warning. If the violation isn’t corrected in a reasonable amount of time, their service is disconnected and it will cost them $100 to have it reconnected. A second violation results in a $200 reconnection charge and a flow restrictor on their service.

Among the areas hardest hit by a third of drought is the San Joaquin Valley, where many farmers rely on the state and federal water projects for deliveries. The Westlands Water District, which serves 600,000 acres of farmland in Fresno and Kings counties, will receive just 10 percent of what it normally gets from the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Central Valley Water Project.

What that means for the district’s farmers is more expensive water, fields and more pressure on an already over-drawn groundwater system. Westlands spokesperson Sarah Woolf said even if the bureau increases water allocations in the coming weeks, it wouldn’t help farmers this year.

The drastic reduction in water deliveries from the Central Valley Project has forced farmers to greatly increase groundwater pumping, which has set off environmental impacts. The district has yet to take criminal action against any of its customers.

In L.A., the DWP has issued 3,600 citations in the past year for water wasters. A second citation results in a monetary fine. One district used a combination of higher rates and a vigorous public outreach campaign to coax its customers into conserving water. The East Bay Municipal Utilities District cut their water use by 13 percent after the district’s 1.3 million customers opted out of the drought emergency.

All those conservation efforts won’t prevent water rates from increasing for the district’s customers, however. Because of the great job of conserving water, EBMUD’s customers will face a 7.5 percent rate increase later this summer. As water sales drop, so do revenues for water districts, which rely on water sales for a lot of their budgets. But, the agencies have a high percentage of fixed costs for overhead and labor, and the sales deficit must be made up somewhere.

In California’s latest doom-and-gloom announcement, Governor Schwarzenegger’s Department of Finance on Tuesday proposed closing the state’s main welfare program, releasing nonviolent prisoners one year early and shuttering up to 80 percent of state parks to shrink the state’s $24.3 billion budget deficit.

Schwarzenegger wants $5.6 billion in new cuts to replace a like amount of borrowing he proposed in his budget plan earlier this month. The Republican governor previously asked for more than $15 billion in other savings by slashing schools and Medi-Cal, laying off 5,000 state workers and borrowing money from local governments.

Several of the latest cuts were eye-openers, but the largest was the wholesale elimination of the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids Program, which provides grants to parents that people commonly refer to as “welfare.”

Nearly 1.3 million Californians received CalWORKs payments in February, almost 1 million of whom were children. The state would save $1.3 billion next year by eliminating CalWORKs but lose three times as much in federal funds.

“It boggles the mind that California would be the only state in the Union without a CalWORKs-type program,” said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association. “In fact, we’d be, to our knowledge, the only state in a country in the entire First World not to have subsistence benefits for children.”

Department of Finance Chief Deputy Director Ana Matosantos laid out the governor’s plan during a conference committee hearing, going through each proposal line by line, prompting questions – and expressions of shock. Democratic committee members took issue with many ideas but pledged to consider them in hearings.

Besides the CalWORKs elimination, more than 900,000 low-income children would lose medical coverage under a proposal to eliminate the state’s Healthy Families program, saving $250 million.

“I would hate to see us eliminate the safety net at a time of rising unemployment, people losing their homes and increasing homelessness,” said Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, in a telephone interview. “Having said that, I do completely recognize the revenue situation is serious.”

Schwarzenegger envisions phasing out Cal Grants for low-income college students. He would save $10 million by giving only $7,000 to the University of California’s Hastings College of Law, the bare minimum so as not to upset the state’s 19th-century contract with the Hastings family. And he wants to defend state parks, forcing them to rely on user fees.

“It could be upwards of 80 percent of parks not having sufficient fee revenues to continue to operate,” Matosantos said.

A Schwarzenegger proposal to close parks last year didn’t go anywhere, but the state’s fiscal condition has worsened considerably since then.

The Governor’s plan would release a year early, about 19,000 nonviolent, non-serious prisoners not convicted of sex offenses, saving $120 million. He also would seek $790 million in savings by reducing inmate services such as substance abuse counseling and vocational education.

The Governor proposes saving $150 million by retaining a two-day furlough for state workers.

Schwarzenegger would cut Medi-Cal services such as dialysis, breast cancer treatment for women over 65 and non-emergency care for undocumented immigrants.

Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, Chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Committee, said it would be more responsible to seek additional taxes.

“With this proposal, the Governor’s made it very clear he’d rather throw women and children out of the lifeboat before he raises taxes,” she said.

But Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks,said the state’s economy cannot sustain further tax increases, so there are no other options.

“I think everybody here would agree, Republicans and Democrats alike, that we would not want to make these drastic reductions that we’re going to be making if we didn’t have to,” Niello said. “But the unfortunate fact is, we have to.”

In a speech to California small-business leaders in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger lamented the various cuts he had proposed this month, saying, “Behind every one of those dollars that we cut there are real faces.”

But he warned that “if we don’t make those cuts, I think that we will face catastrophic consequences.”

And Schwarzenegger isn’t done yet. The governor’s aides are expected to outline an additional $3 billion in cuts by Friday, responding to new projections showing that the deficit is larger than he originally anticipated.

During Tuesday’s hearing, nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor suggested there were better ways to eliminate the shortfall that would allow the state to leverage federal dollars.

“You rightly were concerned about the draconian nature of some of those (cuts), because I think it’s a whole difference from the kind of options you saw in the May revision or, frankly, the kind of options that we put on the table,” Taylor told Evans.

Lawmakers and Schwarzenegger agreed in February to close $36 billion of a $42 billion budget deficit with a mix of higher taxes and spending cuts. But they used outdated data and underestimated the extent to which the economy would stall. Voters last week rejected $6 billion in other solutions.

State leaders face pressure to resolve the deficit quickly. California must borrow between $10 billion and $23 billion starting in July to pay its bills. To do so, the state needs to show investors that it has a balanced budget in place. Meanwhile, the state will lose the opportunity to cut money from the 2008-09 budget year that ends June 30 if leaders wait until July.

Schwarzenegger has ruled out tax increases, saying that voters who rejected last week’s special election measures said they wanted no more taxes.