Features
Measure boosting benefits retroactively sent to Davis
SACRAMENTO — Lawmakers on Monday sent the governor a bill raising unemployment benefits for workers who lost their jobs following the Sept. 11 attacks, but a partisan fight will delay the increases for months.
The measure would provide $540 million in higher benefits to nearly 1.16 million Californians who were out of work between Sept. 11 and Jan. 1 by making them eligible for increases that took effect this year.
Those increases raised maximum weekly benefits from $230 to $330.
“This would send a strong message that ... we will do everything we can to repair those injured by a terrorist attack,” said the bill’s author, Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-San Fernando.
The bill initially included urgency language that would have allowed it to take effect immediately after it’s signed by Gov. Gray Davis, who supports the increases.
But Republicans refused to back the legislation last week in the Assembly, preventing supporters from putting together the two-thirds majority needed to approve the bill with urgency language.
That means it won’t take effect until 90 days after the Legislature adjourns a special session called by Davis in January, in part to make the unemployment increases retroactive. There’s no indication now when the session will end.
Senate Minority Leader Jim Brulte, R-Rancho Cucamonga, said before supporting the bill Republicans wanted guarantees that $937 million in federal funds would be used for unemployment benefits instead of other programs.
He said the “clear intent” of Congress was that the money should be used to ease the squeeze on employer-funded unemployment insurance funds, but Alarcon’s bill earmarks only $600 million for that purpose.
He predicted Democrats would try to use the remaining $337 million for other government programs, although he said he didn’t know which programs they might have in mind.
“It’s unfortunate that these benefits are going to take a while to kick in because the majority party wants to give over $300 million to bureaucrats in state government,” Brulte said.
Alarcon said it would take approval of another bill to use the remaining $337 million for something other than unemployment benefits, but Sen. Ray Haynes, R-Riverside, said Democrats have enough votes to do that.
“I think it’s obvious what’s going on here,” he said.
The California Taxpayers Association, a business-oriented group, opposed the bill, arguing that it would provide increases to far more than the 15,000 California workers who lost their jobs because of the Sept. 11 attacks and would help employees even if they had found new jobs.
But Alarcon said even if previously out-of-work employees had found new jobs they still needed the increases.