State parks that cost $10 to visit each one, when there is often nothing in them? Nah, that state is great at getting at your money and wasting it on corrupt government.
It's regular park not an amusement park. I don't know what you want "in them" other than hiking paths, picnic tables, parks free of trash/debris, respectable camping grounds, running water and toilets. Maybe you're not a nature person, but that seems worth $10 to me.
I'm not sure what your expectations are, but I've done a lot of hiking and camping across the USA and CA does it pretty well.
Typically the fees are proportional to the facilities provided. CA often provides well maintained and regularly cleaned flush toilets and even hot showers at the state parks w/campgrounds, this is far less common in other states.
CA does it so well I generally prefer camping there over staying in hotels. It's typically too much of a hassle elsewhere in the country, where KOA "campgrounds" are often the only options with such facilities.
I've also done a lot of day hikes in CA state parks where there's no fee. You just park at a trail head and off you go, and these sometimes even have pit toilets at the lot, still with no fee at all.
Oh, many things that get lost in the details. One of the more surprising is how budget nonsense can work out reasonably well. The spending mandates that apply to the budget exceed the actual budget. As a result state employees allocate resources using their best judgement. Thus the political chaos surrounding the budget is converted into an orderly surrender to government administrators.
California has been in budget crisis for most of the time I have lived here which is one of the reasons for the very recent situation with the surplus. Several years of surplus does not necessarily make the process for dealing with a lack of surplus any less interesting unless you assume that the business cycle has disappeared.
CA changed its budgeting laws during the last financial crisis to lower its dependence on transient high-income events like IPOs, and most of CA's budget problems stems from the state getting back less from the federal government than its residents pay in federal taxes (in contrast to red/flyover states, which for all their talk about low taxes would be bankrupt without the largesse provided by CA and NY).
Notably, California had a budget surplus despite a relative lack of high-profile IPOs the past several years.
It helps that many of CA's biggest industries are at the high-end of the value spectrum (i.e., tech, biotech, Hollywood, and video games).
