from Damon R. Conklin, Director of Government Affairs
Sacramento Regional Builders Exchange
As you may know, Governor Brown unveiled his last state spending plan earlier this morning. I monitored the presser and have culled through the budget summary to extract highlights that impact our industry. Biggest take away is that infrastructure spending is up because of the road construction maintenance (SB 1), wildfires, water conveyance, HSR, etc. There are 10 new courthouses that are slated to be built in the next two years, namely, projects in Imperial, Riverside/Indio, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Tuolumne in 2018-19 and projects in Glenn, Riverside/Mid-County, Sacramento, Sonoma, and Stanislaus in 2019-20. Also, the Budget includes $32.2 million from the Immediate and Critical Needs Account to complete the design of three courthouse projects in Riverside/Mid-County, Sonoma and Stanislaus.
Despite our efforts to ensure permanent funding towards the CTE Incentive Grant Program, which provided $900 million over a three-year period to encourage the creation and expansion of high-quality CTE programs during local educational agencies’ implementation of the LCFF has now expired and is now depleted. To date, almost 400 local educational agencies have received funding from this program. The 2018-19 Budget proposes an ongoing increase of $200 million Proposition 98 General Fund to establish a K-12 specific component of the Strong Workforce Program to encourage the establishment and support of K-12 CTE programs that are aligned with needed industry skills, and proposes an ongoing increase of $12 million Proposition 98 General Fund to fund local industry experts who will provide technical support to local educational agencies operating, or proposing to operate, CTE programs.
In the days ahead, I will provide a more detailed summary of the proposed budget and how our industry in impacted, and I wanted to make sure that you had a few quick bullet points to highlight when interacting with local media outlets, stakeholders or members.
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The governor’s state infrastructure spending plan provides support for shovel-ready projects, as well as phased-in approaches for newly established programs that will create some much-needed economic development for the commercial construction industry.
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The budget also commits $1 billion to completing construction for the next ten courthouse projects throughout the state, including …insert your local project listed above here.
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That being said, we are very disappointed that the governor did not prioritize the needed state investment towards workforce development programs to prepare the next generation of workers. With infrastructure spending up and efforts to close the housing gap, we need more workers and an ability to adequately train them. We look forward to working with the Legislature to increase the CTE and workforce development programs throughout our state in order to keep pace with the demand.
The full budget summary can be viewed here: http://ebudget.ca.gov/FullBudgetSummary.pdf
As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions or concerns.
Damon R. Conklin, Director of Government Affairs, Sacramento Regional Builders Exchange
NEW ADDRESS! 5370 Elvas Avenue ǀ Sacramento, CA 95819 Telephone: 916.442.8991 ǀ Fax: 916.446.3117 | Cell: 916.290.3400. Email: dconklin@srbx.org ǀ www.srbx.org. 
