SACRAMENTO -- In a strident and sweeping State of the State address, Gov. Jerry Brown declared Thursday morning that "California did the impossible," bouncing back from the precipice of fiscal collapse to emerge as an economic leader.
With references to the Bible, the history of the California republic and Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Brown mapped out a vision for the state that includes big investment in its water and rail systems and schools free of regulations that he says inhibit flexibility and creativity.
Brown also called a special session of the Legislature for implementation of President Obama's healthcare law, "to deal with those issues that must be decided quickly if California is to get the Affordable Care Act started by next January."
But he stressed that his top priority is keeping the state from falling back into financial chaos.
"We have promises to keep," Brown said, alluding to his successful campaign last fall to persuade voters to raise taxes by billions of dollars. "And the most important one we made to the people if Proposition 30 passed: that we would guard jealously the money…. Fiscal discipline is not the enemy of our good intentions but the basis for realizing them."
He praised lawmakers for helping the state dig out of its fiscal morass but also called on them to show restraint. "What we need to do for our future will require more than producing hundreds of new laws each year," Brown said.
He warned of the dangers of "constantly expanding the coercive power of government by adding each year so many minute prescriptions to our already detailed and turgid legal system."
The governor cited schools as an area where the deluge of laws has undermined good policy. Returning to one of his favorite themes, he urged lawmakers to consider the "principle of subsidiarity … the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level."
Brown repeated the call he made earlier this month to free local districts from dozens of state mandates for school spending and to shift more state money to districts with poorer students and non-native English speakers.
He said the steady tuition hikes at the state's institutions of higher education need to stop.
"I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities," Brown said, to standing applause in the packed Assembly chamber that held the entire Legislature.
In calling a special session on healthcare, Brown said the state will next year begin providing insurance to nearly 1 million Californians under the federal law and in the coming years will steadily reduce the number of uninsured.
But he warned of attendant risks: "The ultimate costs of expanding our healthcare system under the Affordable Care Act are unknown."
The governor also used his address to tout his ambitious plans for refurbishing the state's water systems. He acknowledged that it will be costly. But inaction, he said, would likely prove more expensive, leaving California exposed to an economic disaster on the scale of that wrought elsewhere by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.
The governor also made a plug for his other costly infrastructure initiative, high-speed rail. He said the United States is lagging far behind other countries in this sector, saying that even Morocco is building a high-speed train system.
He called the state's bullet-train plan, which would eventually link San Francisco and Los Angeles, bold, like "everything about California."
The governor also announced will lead a trade mission to China to strengthen California's economic ties with that country and officially open the state's new trade and investment office in Shanghai.
evan.halper@latimes.com
