New statistics give a clear and positive picture: California is leading the nation economically, forging new business growth and creating 500,000 new jobs a year. That is good news for California, and it ought to be good news for our children's future as well. But a move by Governor Wilson and his Republican colleagues could bring this prosperity to a halt.

With a surplus in the state budget of over $4 billion, I was convinced that we could start to repair the damage done to our schools during the recent recession when we plunged from the top to the bottom in per-pupil spending on education.

Around the state, our children are asked to enter school buildings where the roofs leak, where toilets are broken, where water taps don't work, where there is no air conditioning in stifling summer months, and no heat during wet and cold winters.

We are the seventh-largest economy in the world. But, we are trying to educate our children in buildings that are not as modern or as safe as the prisons where we house violent criminals.

That is not only repugnant, but it also will leave us ill-prepared to confront the economic challenges that the next century will bring. That's why I saw this surplus as a great opportunity to reinvest in California's future, to move our schools at least back toward the national average instead of being a dismal 37th - the bottom third of the nation in per pupil spending - and even beyond, back into the first tier where California belongs.

But perhaps this dream is not to be. The governor and my Republican colleagues in the Assembly have decided against making this long-term investment in our schools by eliminating something called the vehicle license fee (VLF). Under this proposal, most working class families would save about $100 or less a year in reduced car registration fees. When fully implemented, it would cut $3.6 billion from our budget every year.

Never mind that this is a tax break mostly for the wealthiest among us: the owner of a 1998 Cadillac Seville would save over $1,200 under the proposal!

The terrible tragedy of this proposal is that, under the governor's own economic assumptions, it dooms our state to remain at the bottom of the heap when it comes to supporting our public schools. It means our kids will never have a full set of textbooks; that we will be unable to get into our schools the number of credentialed and competent teachers we need to accommodate California's growth; that our kids will be forced to go to sub-standard schools forever, and that California's high-tech businesses will be forced more and more to look elsewhere for the trained employees they must have to remain competitive.

All that loss for a hundred dollars a year in car registration savings - money that could make an enormous impact in the education of our children, and the future of our state. When you listen, with an open mind, to both sides of the issue, you will come to same conclusion I have, that what we can achieve for our children by not taking $3.6 billion permanently out of the budget is more important than what we could do for ourselves with $100 in savings.

Eliminating the VLF forces us to use one-time monies to fund an on-going project. That is not a prudent way to spend taxpayer money. Not only can we avoid that risk, we can do something for California's children. The VLF proposal may sound appealing on first blush - but we need to consider our economic future. We cannot depend on a continuing sizeable budget surplus in years to come. Our current surplus must go to one-time projects, like new instructional materials and deferred maintenance projects for our schools. One-time monies for one-time projects is the fiscally prudent route to take, it is also the route that benefits us all by investing in our public education system.

During the recession, California taxpayers were called upon to shore up the services we expect from our government. You sacrificed to make sure the state remained solvent. And it is right that, in fatter times, the state should refund some of that tax money back to its source. Last year, we fashioned a $1.5 billion tax cut for Californians, the largest tax cut in California history at that time. And this year we are proposing $600 million in additional middle-class tax cuts.

But we also asked our school children to sacrifice and, at some point, we have another obligation, just as sacred, an obligation to our children who are, after all, our future. If not now, when? If not with the surplus we have today, then with what?