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SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California's budget, the state's official spending blueprint for the 1998-99 fiscal year, is nearly a month late and nobody seems to care much.

Certainly not the governor and legislative leaders, who thus far have failed to reach a political compromise on a potential tax cut, the critical issue in the $75 billion document.

Certainly not the Legislature, where members of both houses are waiting to see what their leaders negotiate with the governor.

Certainly not the two-house budget conference committee, the panel of lawmakers from the Assembly and the Senate that once was the most powerful committee in the Legislature but has since been reduced to rubber stamping the wishes of the leaders.

In fact, not only is the budget late each year -- it's been late most years since the mid 1980s -- it also is negotiated in secret. Although the budget goes before both houses of the Legislature for final votes, the critical pieces of the budget are decided in the office of the governor in the so-called "Big Five" meetings of the governor and the Democratic and Republican leaders of each house.

The irony here is that the public doesn't seem to care if the budget is late, and doesn't seem to mind that the single most important piece of legislation to emerge from the state Capitol in the course of the year is crafted in secret.

Considering the importance of the budget, one would think that politicians in Sacramento from the governor on down would be hammered by constituents to get the job done. But that's not the case. Indeed, the only people who really have a real interest in the budget are the employees of the Legislature, about 2,000 people, who know that they won't get paid if a budget isn't signed.

The largest state in the nation with the largest budget, California also is the world's seventh-largest economy. And yet the public appears unconcerned that billions of dollars in spending is unresolved, that spending for schools, prisons, welfare services, highways and a thousand other purposes is on hold.

If there is one thing politicians respond to, it's public pressure. Perhaps if the public complained, and loudly, about the tardy budget warring lawmakers would be forced to reach an agreement.

But as in so many public issues, the intervention of a court has played a critical role.

Last week, a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles gave a jump start to the state's stalled budget negotiations by ruling that absent a budget the state did not have the legal authority to pay most of its bills. The judge raised the possibility that state operations would grind to a halt.

For once lawmakers and the governor acted: Almost immediately, the Legislature approved an emergency spending bill and the governor signed it quickly into law. The bill allows the state to continue conducting business as usual while the politicians decide on the high-profile tax cut and the best way to spend some $4.4 billion in new revenue.

In the end, the budget is a political document as much as it is a fiscal blueprint. And in an election year, there's plenty of politics to go around.

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