SACRAMENTO -- Budget talks have given way to budget bickering.

Still in finger-pointing mode days after the collapse of budget negotiations, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, complained that in a meeting with Gov. Jerry Brown earlier this week, he "was yelled at more than I was talked to and mostly from Mrs. (Anne Gust) Brown," who is a special counsel to the governor.

"Bob Dutton is becoming increasingly erratic and irrelevant," retorted Gil Duran, Brown's spokesman. "Next thing you know, he'll be saying Sutter (Brown's pet dog) barked at him. He seems on the sensitive side."
The back and forths between Dutton and the Brown administration show that emotions are still raw after talks were suddenly halted earlier this week.

Republicans have responded with what appears to be a coordinated, aggressive attempt at framing the failure as Brown's, disseminating a video on YouTube juxtaposing Brown's campaign promises of bringing an "insider's knowledge but an outsider's mind" with his video declaration that talks had broken down. And the state GOP released another video mocking him for being "nowhere near a solution" and missing his 60-day deadline.

In response to Dutton's recriminations, Duran tweeted a video of the Four Season's "Big Girls Don't Cry."
"Everybody's in a save-face posture," said Larry Gerston, political science professor at San Jose State University. "It's damage control all the way now because everybody looks bad. We should expect to see a good deal of fallout over the next several weeks as each side reassembles its armor and decides which tact to take next."


The GOP leader also complained that the governor "did not reach out to me one time to talk about the budget or anything else" while Brown was trying to work out a deal on tax extensions with five other Republican legislators.

Neither Brown nor his wife responded to the charges.

But Brown released a full list of the concessions he made to Republicans during the talks. It showed 12 proposed fixes to the pension system, including a pension benefit cap, limits on post-retirement public employment and hybrid defined contribution/benefit options.

Brown decided to release the list only after Dutton went public with his complaints, a source from Brown's office said. Brown intends to introduce the pension reforms with or without Republican support, his office said.

"All 12 of these pension reform measures were presented and discussed in detail with Republican legislators," said a statement from Brown's office. "Talks broke down, however, over other issues."

Those issues included Republican demands to restore corporate tax breaks that would blow a $4 billion hole in Brown's budget, which seeks to fill a $26.6 billion deficit with a mixture of spending reductions and revenues. The governor has already signed into law $11.2 billion in proposed solutions, including $8.2 billion in cuts.

Brown had largely dealt with a core group of five Republican senators -- the so-called GOP 5 -- who sought rollbacks in pension benefits, environmental regulations and a cap on future spending in exchange for their votes to put Brown's tax extensions on the ballot.

But when they reached an impasse after nearly two months of talks, the group Friday handed negotiations over to Dutton and his lead budget negotiator, Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar. That's when Dutton and Huff delivered to Brown a list of 53 demands, ranging from requiring a restoration of funding for the state fair to moving the presidential primary to March. That was on top of the rollbacks they wanted in pension benefits and environmental regulations, as well as a hard cap on future spending, a series of education reforms and the restoration of the corporate tax breaks that Brown has sought to eliminate.

Dutton insists that his seven-page document was not a list of demands, but rather an "outline" to spark new discussions after Brown failed to reach agreement with the GOP 5.

"I wasn't involved in those negotiations," he said. "I needed to know where we stood before we started negotiations. Every item was to try to determine where our starting point was."

In describing why he thought Anne Gust Brown yelled at him, he said, "I can only speculate, but there was too much confusion regarding the role of the GOP 5. I don't think there was a full understanding that you really needed to be talking to me if you actually wanted to do serious budget negotiations."

In a letter to Dutton, Brown chided him for adding a giant wish list of demands at a point in negotiations when they should have been narrowing down to common areas of agreement.

At that point, Dutton said, "it became obvious to me there really wasn't a desire to work out anything in a bipartisan fashion."

Dutton conceded, however, that of the three or four Senate Republicans considering voting for a tax extension, none were willing unless they'd gotten concessions on virtually every demand.
Meanwhile, Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he continues to talk with individual Republicans for a deal that would include taxes and address GOP reforms.

"I don't want to create undo expectations," he said. "But we're not going away. We'll keep at it. There are several Republicans that have made it very clear publicly they are interested in getting this done and are interested in avoiding the calamity that would be an all-cuts budget, so we'll continue to talk."

Steinberg said that to put taxes on the ballot, Democrats would have to agree to some sort of spending restraint, also on the ballot, as well as pension reforms.

The Legislature still has 90 days to finish the budget before July 1, and by then, Steinberg said, voters should be well aware of the potential cuts to schools and public safety.

"The consequences will become increasingly stark as we begin budget committee hearings and we lay out what an all-cuts budget looks like," he said.