BILL TO BE MODIFIED TO EXPAND PAY HIKES.

Byline: Doug Willis Associated Press 

Democratic leaders of the state Senate plan to turn a noncontroversial bill to pay extra fire and flood protection costs into a 3 percent pay raise for all state employees.

``It is a deficiency appropriations bill. It seemed to many of us to be an opportunity to talk about other program deficiencies,'' Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, D-Hayward, said of the appropriations bill for the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Lockyer said it is ``virtually certain'' that the forestry bill would be amended to add pay raises for all state employees when it comes before the Senate Budget Committee today.

It is also likely, he said, that work rules requiring a minimum of three firefighters per truck would be added to the bill.

Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro Jr., R-San Luis Obispo, the author of the Forestry Department bill, condemned the proposed amendments as ``a game of chicken which should not be played.''

The bill is intended to pay for state workers and suppliers who fought the fires and floods of the past few months.

``This is not a policy bill. That should be debated elsewhere,'' Bordonaro said.

Bordonaro said an extraordinarily large number of fires last fall, plus emergency flood work since January, have pushed the Forestry Department's expenses over its 1996-97 budget by $69 million. Without the supplemental appropriation, the agency will run out of money April 1, three months before the end of the fiscal year.

Lockyer said the pay raise amendment would add about $75 million to the cost of the bill. That would provide raises for the final three months of the 1996-97 fiscal year to state workers who haven't had raises in nearly three years.