Marathon session clears the way for Legislature to adjourn

At about an hour after sunrise Wednesday, following a marathon session of negotiating that turned into an all-nighter, the Legislature adjourned for the year.

It’s difficult to convey what that final day was like, Tuesday was day 30 of the 30-day special session the governor had called, but it was sort of like being close to the end of harvest, with an unfriendly weather forecast hanging over your head and knowing that one or more pieces of equipment could break down at any time. You know you might be forced to stop, but you can’t afford to stop voluntarily, so you cross your fingers and keep pushing forward.

There were plenty of emotional peaks and valleys, and people were dog-tired, but I have to believe working 22-plus hours straight – from 9 a.m. Tuesday to 7:30 a.m. Wednesday – led to a weakening of the resistance to the reforms our side wanted. Our coalition realized we needed to keep the pressure on the House majority party, and adjourning for the night would have allowed its leaders to regroup, which might have prolonged our time in Olympia by another two or three weeks. Fortunately, the governor sensed that too, and called another special session at midnight, as soon as day 30 ended.

This wasn’t my first all-nighter as a legislator, the previous one was in 2003 if I recall correctly, nor was it the first time I’d worked past midnight on the final day of a session. Still, this one was different. As floor leader and one of the budget negotiators for our side, I wasn’t in a position to catch a few winks between votes and negotiating sessions, the way others could. My turn to rest came only after everything was said and done, about 27 hours after I’d rolled out of my bunk the day before. Thank goodness for coffee, those two slices of pizza and a whole lot of adrenalin.

Following my previous commentary, a couple of weeks ago, our Senate Republican leader, Mike Hewitt of Walla Walla, went into the hospital for major surgery to remove an abdominal tumor that had just been discovered. I’m glad to report the surgery went fine, and Mike was able to rejoin us on a limited basis in the final days of the session. The Senate Republican caucus chair, Senator Linda Evans Parlette of Wenatchee, showed the depth of our bench by taking over for Senator Hewitt in his absence. In fact, she and I were the last two Republican senators left in the Senate chamber after daybreak Wednesday; I was out on the floor, handling the final motions, and she was in front of a Seattle TV station’s camera explaining what had just transpired.

Ruger the hound and I packed up and left Olympia on Thursday afternoon. I’ll have a meeting to go to here and there at the Capitol, but now it’s time for my hands to get reacquainted with the steering wheel of a tractor. It’s good to be home.

Remember ‘reforms before revenue’?

The state operating budget adopted in May 2011, which took effect July 1, was historic in that the Democrats who hold the majority in the Senate worked with Republicans, and together we negotiated with the House; the budget also was significant because, for the first time since 1997, it didn’t spend more than the state was expecting to collect in revenue.

Unfortunately, the revenue predictions didn’t hold up, and by November the gap in the budget was around $2 billion. The governor called a special session for after Thanksgiving to get a jump-start on rebalancing the budget; she also proposed a massive tax hike to close the budget gap that included a ballot measure to raise the sales tax.

Many Democrat legislators came into the regular session in January also talking about tax increases; however, they figured out what an unpopular move that would be with voters, so instead we saw Democrat budgets that would slash spending for basic education by hundreds of millions of dollars and use that money for non-education purposes instead.

Our side had a different approach to balancing the budget: “reforms before revenue,” we said, meaning legislators should work on adopting reforms to make government stretch the dollars it already collects before considering tax hikes and other ways to raise revenue.

A balanced budget, with the focus on priorities

The easiest way to assess the 2012 session is to look at where we finished on Wednesday, keeping in mind how differently things could have turned out if not for the bipartisan Senate coalition that formed just in time to refocus the budget discussions.

• There will be no hit to funding for K-12 education. Democrats had proposed $330 million in cuts.

• There also will be no hit to higher education funding, which is good news for WSU and EWU, in our district.

• Hospitals and nursing homes were spared devastating blows endorsed by the governor and some senators.

• We preserved support for services to the most vulnerable Washingtonians, including the elderly and those with developmental disabilities.

• The $31.1 billion supplemental operating budget spends within the resources available, which can only help avert a budget gap next year.

K-12 education is a constitutional priority, and most of us would agree higher education also deserves a strong commitment. It’s good that we could hold the line on funding for both.

The budget has a total reserve of almost $320 million; I’d certainly have preferred something closer to what our coalition and the governor wanted, more than half a billion dollars. However, that’s part of compromising. The governor’s reaction to the budget suggests she may use her veto pen to cross out some spending and add those dollars to the reserve.

Landmark reforms will pay off in the long run

No one was talking seriously about reforms this year (the majority party certainly didn’t feel bound by our side’s call for “reforms before revenue”) until the bipartisan Senate coalition formed in early March.

While these reforms don’t help close the gap in the current budget, they offer major long-term benefits to taxpayers and public employees and will help put state government on more stable financial ground. Also, none of these reforms represents a cut.

• Senate Bill 6378: Public employees hired as of May 2013 who enroll in the Public Employees Retirement System, Teachers Retirement System or School Employees Retirement System may retire before age 65, after 30 years of service, with a pension that is reduced 5 percent for each year of retirement before age 65. In other words, a future 30-year employee who retires at age 55 would receive a 50 percent monthly benefit; current state employees in the same position would receive an 80 percent monthly benefit. The state’s pension system is among the biggest cost-drivers in state government; this reform is expected to save public employers and taxpayers approximately $1.3 billion over the next 25 years.

• Senate Bill 5940: Many public-school teachers and classified staff are forced to purchase their health-care insurance from a single carrier, through their school districts, and that lack of choice is a factor in why the premiums for family-level coverage have become unaffordable for some. SB 5940 would require districts to disclose expenses, reserves, fees, premium costs and so on; allow open contracting; greater equity between the cost of coverage for an individual and the cost of family coverage; and give employees access to high-deductible health plans and health savings accounts. Districts that don’t comply with these standards by December 2015 would be forced to join the insurance pool to which general-government employees have belonged for many years, which was administered by the Public Employees Benefit Board.

• Senate Bill 6636: The Legislature is good at making changes in the budget without looking at what those changes will mean in later budget cycles. SB 6636 would require budgets to balance across four years, meaning the current two-year cycle plus the next two years, before they are adopted. This requirement, thought to be the first of its kind in the nation, will force legislators to consider the long-term costs that go with their spending choices, and reduce the chance that one biennium’s budget will lead to a big deficit in the next biennium.

It’s true that the reforms ended up in a different place than where they started; however, that’s the nature of negotiations. You don’t lay all your cards on the table right off, but instead figure out where you want to finish and adjust the starting position accordingly. There can be no question that the Senate coalition accomplished things no one, except its members, would have imagined a month and a half ago.

Also, it’s safe to figure none of these reforms would have made it through the Legislature if our bipartisan coalition had not taken the lead on the budget process in the Senate – and there would have been no bipartisan coalition without the three Democratic senators who were steadfast in their commitment to reforms that would make a difference. It’s encouraging to know that good policy can overcome party affiliations.