Voters statewide will have a busy year at the ballot box to chart the future.

California enters the new year with its existential issues still unresolved, and a new one – an immense budget deficit – threatens to make dealing with them even more difficult.

California has made little progress, if any, on its shortage of housing, or its levels of homelessness and poverty. Its population is declining as Californians decamp for other states.

The Legislature’s budget analyst has calculated that California faces a $68 billion gap between revenue and already programmed spending over a three-year period that began in 2022. Annual deficits are in the $30 billion range thereafter.

Next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom will quantify his version of the yawning gap and how he proposes to close it, touching off six months of negotiations with the Legislature on a 2024-25 budget.

Competing ballot measures has become a trend.

It will dominate election-year discourse in California and complicate Newsom’s simultaneous efforts to expand his national political image by portraying California as a model of compassionate and effective governance that should be emulated elsewhere.

Newsom and other statewide officials will not be on the ballot this year, and it’s certain that Democrats will continue to enjoy supermajorities in both legislative houses. The big election year action will be on a spate of high-dollar ballot measures, particularly those that would affect how Californians are taxed. While it’s coincidental that tax issues are arising just as the state experiences one of its periodic budget deficits, the juxtaposition does give the campaigns for and against an added flavor.

The most prominent tax measure, sponsored by the California Business Roundtable and other corporate groups, would make raising taxes more difficult. If passed, it would require voter approval of any state tax increases and increase voting thresholds for local taxes.

Democrats and their allies, especially public employee unions, despise the measure, and the Legislature seeks to undermine it with a constitutional amendment – also on the November ballot – that would increase the required voting margin for measures that increase margins for taxes.

In addition to those dueling propositions, a third measure, also placed on the November ballot by the Legislature, would lower the voting threshold for local taxes and bonds for infrastructure improvements. Having competing ballot measures on the same issue has become something of a trend in recent elections.

Those, however, are just three of the propositions that could be placed before voters this year. Statewide voters will decide on at least a dozen measures in November. Competing interests could easily spend a quarter-billion dollars trying to persuade voters.

Interestingly, and perhaps sadly, none of them will materially affect the aforementioned existential issues that have come to define California in the 21st century. The chances are that when Californians look back on 2024, those issues will be as depressing as ever.

DAN WALTERS a columnist for CalMatters, where this story first appeared.