The battle over Governor Schwarzenegger's executive order reducing the state's payroll is about to get real interesting, real fast.

This afternoon, the Schwarzenegger administration sent Controller John Chiang a letter formally requesting Chiang begin the process of reducing some state worker paychecks down to minimum wage.

There's been no formal response yet from Chiang, a first-term Democrat who until this budget crisis has largely not been in the media spotlight. But the controller has made it abundantly clear in recent days that he will not implement the executive order, arguing both that the payroll computer system can't be reprogrammed in time, and that Schwarzenegger's intepretation of the 2003 court ruling on which the executive order is based is flawed.

If that position holds, then we're headed for a new court case. "Should [Chiang] say that he is not going to work with us," said gubernatorial spokesman Aaron McLear, "the next step for us is to file a lawsuit."

The governor and controller are both elected by the voters, and thus are independent entities. That means only a judge... and probably the justices on the California Supreme Court... can decide who's reading of the law is right.

Stay tuned.

And finally, we now know which departments will be fully exempted from the "minimum wage only" order sought by the governor. The list includes both CHP and CalFire (mentioned earlier), as well as workers at Caltrans, the state Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Emergency Services, the Departments of Developmental Services and Mental Health, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and a few more.

No word yet on how much savings the governor now estimates after exempting these employees.