Now that the state budget is signed, Assemblywoman Noreen Evans is tallying her district’s wins and losses.

Rural communities like Napa County made out better than she originally feared they would, according to Evans, who serves as chairwoman of the Assembly’s budget committee. Statewide, though, she’s not so pleased.

“While I feel very good about what I was able to preserve locally, I’m very worried about the long-term impact on the state as a whole,” Evans said.

On the “win” side, Evans counts the elimination of a proposed wine excise tax from the budget, and the protection of funding for a property tax law that helps preserve agricultural lands.

The wine excise tax, proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, would have increased taxes on wine by 640 percent. Taxes on a gallon of wine would have shot up from 20 cents to $1.48, Evans said.

“I think that had we gone forward with this tax, it would have had a devastating impact on the wine industry (and) would also have had a negative impact on California revenues over time,” she said.

Napa vintners such as Margaret Duckhorn worked furiously to defeat the proposal, meeting with legislators, including Evans.

“In an economic market like we’re living with right now, wine sales are a bit challenging,” Duckhorn said. “So a tax increase like that would be pretty substantial. It would either mean increasing your prices in a market that’s already challenged or changing your expenses, which in many ways could mean laying off people or paying growers less for grapes.”

Duckhorn said that while local vintners reached out to a number of legislators, as well as the governor’s staff, Evans’ work as budget committee chairwoman was influential in helping defeat the wine tax.

“Certainly, having her on our side and understanding our issues definitely helped,” Duckhorn said.

Evans also worked to maintain funding for the Williamson Act. The state law encourages preservation of agricultural lands and open space by reducing property taxes for land owners who commit to keeping their property agricultural.

Evans said Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon was one of the first people to bring the threat to Williamson Act funding to her attention.

“I made a point of going to Noreen as chairwoman of the budget committee,” Dillon said. “It was my understanding from talking to folks in the capitol … that (they) didn’t believe the Williamson Act was necessary anymore or thought about it only as a monetary issue, not as a land use policy issue.”

Dillon noted that Napa County has its own preservation measures, but that eliminating Williamson Act funding would have meant a hit to the county’s budget because the county would have been forced to make up the difference in property taxes.

Eliminating Williamson Act funding would have cost Napa County $84,000, said Evans’ press secretary Anthony Matthews.

Evans said she also worked to protect funding for the Veterans Home of California at Yountville, including money for the home’s general operations budget, a project to upgrade the fire alarm system and prescription drug benefits and maintenance. Overall, Evans said she helped secure $93.5 million for the Veterans Home.

System still broken

Efforts to protect rural sheriff funding were also “hugely critical” to Napa County, she said.

Evans acknowledges that there is still uncertainty over state funding for several projects in Napa County that have been stopped or delayed because of the state’s inability to sell bonds.

Among the affected projects are Napa River flood control, the Berryessa Trail project, the Napa River fish barrier removal and the state’s acquisition of property controlled by the Napa County Land Trust for Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.

Evans said that that while passing the state budget “avoided a complete financial meltdown,” she has major concerns about some of its provisions.

 “It has huge cuts to services at a time when demands for services is rising. … We are disinvesting in our children’s education (and) we’re raising taxes during a recession,” she said.

Her biggest criticism of the budget is that the cuts to education are “insupportable, indefensible, and, I believe, immoral. Somehow, going forward as a state, we’ve got to address that issue.”

The Napa Valley Unified School District will lose $8.8 million next school year, Superintendent John Glaser said.

“I totally agree with Assemblywoman Evans,” Glaser said. “I think as the dust is settling —  it’s taken us awhile to absorb even the full significance of what the state has done — the more we learn the worse it’s feeling.”

Evans points out that her work as budget committee chairwoman is far from over. The next step is to incorporate funding from the federal stimulus package into the budget, she said. In May, when the state does its annual budget revision, “We’ll have a better idea about whether or not we have to make additional cuts.”

Longterm, Evans said the state needs to take a serious look at budget reform.

“The two-thirds vote to pass a budget is simply unworkable, and that’s what led to the six-month delay,” she said. “We may have taken care of the initial crisis, but we still have a long way to go.”

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