Legislative Commentary

Last Wednesday the Senate budget leaders brought their plan forward; sure enough, the differences were stark.

The budget has taken up so much of my week that there unfortunately was time for just a few visitors from our district, including Washington State University President Floyd. There’s more budget work ahead, also.

I and the other members of the Senate Ways and Means Committee approved a revised version of the Senate budget; following several more adjustments, we brought it before the full Senate last week, where it passed with a bi-partisan 30-18 vote. I encourage you to keep reading for the details on the budget.

This is by necessity a brief commentary, as today was a long one. However, I’ll close on a positive note: with a Senate-approved budget on the table and more than three weeks left in the legislative session, I see no reason – unless the governor and the Democrat-controlled House are truly dead-set on raising taxes – why the Legislature can’t be ready to adjourn on schedule April 28.

Senate balances budget without new taxes – and without some old ones, too

Unlike the “other Washington” our Legislature has to adopt a budget every year; we can’t get by with continuing resolutions the way Congress does.

What encourages me about the budget the Senate adopted this evening is how it lets us see what the future can be – a future in which the Legislature doesn’t instantly run out and raise taxes on middle-class families and struggling businesses. It’s a future in which elected officials don’t split hairs on definitions of “loopholes” and “extensions” and most of all, “temporary” so that the public may someday have less reason to be cynical about taxes.

It’s also a future in which the budget can remain balanced, so we can return to the Capitol next year without facing a deficit as far as the eye can see.

One of the reforms the Legislature passed last year, to require a budget that balances across not two years but four, drove the Senate’s bipartisan budget-writing team to look farther out than any of their predecessors have had to do. Having spent the previous two years as a budget negotiator, I can tell you a future in which we come back to a balanced budget next year or the following year is a future I prefer.

A report in Washington State Wire captures what I see as the most important accomplishment of the Senate budget – followed closely by the fact that it would put a whole lot more money toward K-12 education, as the state Supreme Court wants to see.

This past fall I really couldn’t have believed we could get to a billion dollars for K-12 education, to respond to the state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision, without crippling taxes.

Even better, the Senate approved education-reform bills that are now before the House and would produce results for taxpayers by starting to reconnect the level of student learning with the dollars invested in our schools.

There is much that can be said about the budget, not just what it would and wouldn’t do but how it delivers on the promise represented by (and pledges made by) our Majority Coalition Caucus when it comes to changing how things are done in Olympia. This opinion piece from me, published in Washington Focus, goes into more detail about that.

Our coalition’s budget chairman is fond of sharing four numbers: 0, meaning the Legislature faces a budget deficit of zero when it returns for the 2014 legislative session (that would be a nice change); 4, a reference to how the operating budget now has to balance against revenue projections for four years, not just two (this is the result of a reform last year’s Senate coalition successfully advocated); 21, for the 21st-century education system Washington needs; and 105, referring to how many days the Legislature is allowed to meet in regular session this year. The budget chair says he wanted to craft a plan that would support or result in all four of those things.

I think he and his Senate-minority counterpart succeeded, and I’ll share some numbers from our budget to support that. There’s zero, as in zero new taxes; two, referring to the pair of temporary tax hikes (placed on service providers, such as architects and engineers, and brewers) from 2010 that our plan would allow to expire on schedule this year; $33.3 billion in spending, which is less than the state expects to have available resource-wise in the course of the next two years; $611 million, for the amount designated to go in reserve (most of it into the state’s rainy-day fund); and $1.5 billion, for the amount of new money we would put toward basic education.

Also, carried out over four years, this budget would lead to a budget surplus of approximately $1.5 billion.

I see a future for higher education in this budget because it supports the “Ten-Three-Fifty” plan two of my coalition colleagues introduced week before last. This approach would put at least 10 percent more funding toward our state-run colleges and universities and reduce in-state tuition by three percent.

If that carries through to the final budget, it will be the first time since 1986 that the Legislature doesn’t raise tuition. The upward spiral of tuition can come to an end, meaning our college-bound students and families finally can see a future without a tuition hike.

No-new-taxes angle figures prominently in reactions to Senate budget

The governor’s tax-heavy budgeting approach, announced last week, makes it easy for our coalition to highlight the fact that the Senate budget doesn’t require new taxes that could hinder our state’s slow but gradual economic recovery. News-media coverage of our budget picked up on that, as exemplified by these headlines:

State Senate GOP budget: no new taxes, $1 billion more for schools (The Seattle Times, from last Wednesday)

Senate Republicans offer ‘bipartisan’ budget that avoids taxes; K-12, employee contracts are funded (The Olympian and Tacoma News Tribune, from last Wednesday)

Senate Republican budget: $1 billion more for schools, no new taxes (TVW’s The Capitol Record, from last Wednesday)

The Senate minority’s lead budget writer, Sen. Jim Hargrove, who has been a lawmaker since 1985 and a senator since 1993, was very complimentary of how inclusive our coalition was in assembling the budget proposal. He told members of the press that he considered it “the most transparent bipartisan process that’s ever happened.”

This budget not only brought together members of the Senate, it also drew praise from some non-traditional allies outside the Legislature.

A spokesman for the Washington Federation of State Employees told The Olympian, “It’s not the budget we expected and we are pleasantly surprised to see the proposal – especially on the (pay) contracts, on making sure there wasn’t going to be monkeying around in restoring three percent pay cuts.”

However, Governor Inslee’s reaction to our plan was more pointed than I would have hoped. He described the Senate budget as “deeply flawed,” making me wonder: Was he referring to the fact that our budget would live within the state’s means? That it wouldn’t require a tax increase? That it would allow the “temporary” tax hikes adopted in 2010 to expire this year, as promised?

Perhaps those are flaws to someone who campaigned on a no-new-taxes platform, then turned around and claimed that making temporary tax increases permanent didn’t qualify as a tax hike.

I get along with the governor well enough, but after a flip-flop like that, how much credibility does he have left, not even four months into his term?