Patricia Nazario
May 13, 2009
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Parents, celebrities, and mental health workers are pledging to defeat several propositions on next week's statewide ballot. KPCC's Patricia Nazario has more about yesterday's rally outside the governor's downtown Los Angeles office.
Patricia Nazario: Demonstrators waved hand-made signs and chanted as cars, buses, and trucks whizzed by.
Demonstrators: No on the props!
Nazario: Actor and director Rob Reiner helped create the First Five program that directed California tobacco taxes to early childhood programs. From the raised speakers' platform, he criticized Sacramento lawmakers – claiming that they're willing to use children, working-class families, and mentally ill people to fix their careless spending.
Rob Reiner: They will always go to our most vulnerable citizens to try and balance their budget.
Nazario: L.A. County mental health worker Ron Ruiz told the crowd to walk along downtown's skid row and witness what happens when people don't get their psychiatric medications.
Ron Ruiz: We help people get jobs, stay on their meds and get them treatment, and make sure they become better functioning members of society.
Nazario: He said state budget cuts would reduce those opportunities, and would probably cause more homelessness. After the rally, Jeremy Thompson with Budget Reform Now, the campaign
for props 1A through 1F, said that defeating the measures would defeat lawmakers' ability to balance California's $21 billion budget deficit.
Jeremy Thompson: That in the end is going to hurt our kids, is going to underfund, even worse, our hospitals, is going to put at risk public safety.
Nazario: Thompson said the measures are time-limited, so any diversion of money from mental health and early childhood programs would be temporary – with the goal of getting the Golden State out of debt.
