30 days may not be enough to produce state budget deal

While it may seem at times that my sporting interests are confined to hunting birds and big game, this is an appropriate time to allow – with the Seattle Mariners having opened the major league season this week – that I also have followed professional baseball since I was a kid.

If you’d asked me back when spring training began whether the Legislature would still be in session come opening day, I would have answered with a hopeful “no.” Yet I’m still at the Capitol as the M’s and Oakland A’s are flying home from two games in Japan, because – to use a baseball term – the Legislature has gone into extra innings.

Of course, baseball games go on and on (weather permitting) until one team prevails. Not so with a special session: it’s limited to 30 days, and unfortunately, at the rate things are going, 30 days may not be enough. Please keep reading for why.

Having been knee-deep in “budget” for weeks now, it sure was a pleasant change to appear on TVW’s “Inside Olympia” program Thursday, March 29, to discuss one of my favorite subjects: Washington agriculture. I encourage you to watch the program if you’d like to learn about some of the agriculture-related issues that came up during this year’s regular legislative session. TVW is on most cable and at least some satellite TV systems, and is also online.

Week three: budget negotiations ‘like the weather’

The special legislative session is approximately three weeks along; however, budget negotiations have been going only for the past two weeks. That’s because a full week was lost before the House Democrats – perhaps fearing the realization that they’d have to do some genuine negotiating with our bipartisan Senate coalition, instead of playing patty-cake with the Senate Democrats – found their way to the negotiating table.

Senator Joe Zarelli, my tag-team partner on budget negotiations, was asked earlier this week how the negotiations are going. He compared them to the weather we’ve seen at the Capitol since the special session began: one day it’s sunny, the next day it’s cold and rainy, then back to dry, and even one morning of snow.

I agree, and as I told two of the editors at the Spokane paper during a phone conversation about the status of budget negotiations, I would have thought a final budget agreement would be closer by now. A couple of previously-reported issues have been swept aside, yet the House Democrats still seem to have cold feet when it comes to adopting reforms that will not only save taxpayers money and stabilize state-government finances over the long run but also benefit public employees.

Case in point: the two House Democrat negotiators (the House Democrat budget leader and the House Democratic Caucus chairman) voted last year for a bill requested by Gov. Gregoire that would not give incoming state employees – as in new hires – the same early-retirement options available to current state employees.

The bill didn’t pass in 2011, but our bipartisan Senate coalition recognized its long-term money-saving potential and revived it this year. So why won’t the two House Democrat negotiators commit now to supporting a reform they voted for last year, especially if it won’t take anything away from current state employees?

I think the answer goes something like this: If the House Democrat negotiators can’t commit to things put on the table unless they get permission from their boss (the speaker of the House), and if their boss has to answer to powerful groups outside the Legislature, and those groups have made a big stink publicly about reforms our coalition has proposed, including pension reform – well, you start to understand why reaching agreement on reforms is taking longer than it should.

I’ve said it before, and it’s appropriate again: As a farmer I’m naturally an optimist, so I am hopeful the negotiations will pick up a lot of speed in the next 48 hours; that might allow a budget package to be put together for consideration by the full Legislature this coming week. If the herky-jerky pace continues, however, it’ll be difficult to avoid another special session.

Outside the budget-negotiating room, a state of denial

While the governor continues to engage in what I would call “shuttle diplomacy,” talking with Democrats, then Republicans, about the budget situation, it’s interesting to look at things going on outside the negotiating room, particularly over in the Senate Democratic Caucus.

One might think Senate Democrat leaders would be satisfied just to have a seat at the negotiating table, considering how their own budget proposal failed so spectacularly a full month ago, during the regular legislative session. Instead, I’ve seen public statements by a couple of those leaders that suggest they may have taken up residence in a state of denial.

I don’t mean the consistent, sore-loser references to the bipartisan Senate coalition’s budget as the “Republican budget” or the “Republican plus three budget.” While that inaccurate label has been repeated far too often in the news media, it amounts to nothing more than a lame effort to deny that some Democrats preferred joining with Republicans to pass a bipartisan Senate budget for the second time in as many years.

No, I’m thinking of the rookie senator whose potshots include recent online postings with such dramatic titles as “The Republican budget: crowded ERs, more felony arrests, and premature death.” This from someone who, described as “fair-minded,” his side’s failed budget proposal, which I could have accurately described as “The Democrat budget: $330 million less for basic education.”

I’m thinking also of the Senate Democrat leader, who posted an e-mail to constituents this week that could win some sort of prize for revisionist history. Her stated hope that “the Republicans will join us in negotiating a (budget) solution” is a wonderful example of denial, considering she now gets to act as majority leader only when allowed to by the bipartisan Senate coalition.

It gets better, though. “The budget must not cut education,” her e-mail declares, and “should protect the people served by critical social service programs.” Well, to set the record straight, the bipartisan Senate budget proposal does not cut education.

That distinction belongs instead to the latest budget adopted by the Democrat-controlled House, which is patterned after the failed budget the Senate Democrat leader supported.

Both schemes would slash $330 million in basic-education funding and make the money available for non-education purposes, yet Senate Democrat leaders continue to deny that they supported such a massive cut.

The bipartisan Senate proposal, meanwhile, also supports critical social-service programs, especially for the developmentally disabled and the elderly – those whose need for services is not the result of decisions they made themselves – without slashing funding that goes directly to school districts, and classrooms.

The young senator who has been reduced to throwing cyber-rocks at the bipartisan Senate budget proposal has conceded that our plan is sustainable “when talking about the bottom line.” Well, that’s a big improvement over the plan he praised, which according to an independent analysis would have led to a $2 billion-plus budget gap next year.

If the Senate Democrat leader and the Senate Democrat whip feel so strongly about expanding the size of the budget “box” so more social services can be fit inside of it, they can always stand up publicly and call for specific tax increases, or publicly endorse the proposed second sell-off of the state’s tobacco-settlement revenue (which would be a sequel to the mother of all budget gimmicks, first employed by the Senate Democrat leader a decade ago).

That would be more forthright than trying to deny that Democrat leaders in both chambers had chosen to balance their budget(s) and fund what they define as the “social safety net” on the backs of Washington’s schoolchildren.