Legislative Commentary

Last Friday, with 16 days left in the legislative session, the Democrats who control the House of Representatives adopted their proposed state-operating budget to cover the next two years.

On the surface, the timing wouldn’t seem to be a concern. Over two weeks is enough for the Senate and House to agree on a budget if there aren’t too many major differences to settle. However, the House budget goes even farther than the governor had when it comes to raising taxes, even though the Senate’s no-new-taxes budget shows it doesn’t have to be that way.

House follows governor’s lead by proposing massive tax increases

Last Friday the majority party in the House adopted its proposed 2013-15 operating budget, on a near-party line vote of 54-43. Among other things, the House budget:

• increases taxes by $1.34 billion;

• spends $13 million less on higher education than the Senate budget and would permit tuition increases of 10 percent at UW/WSU and six percent at other two and four-year institutions;

• makes $757 million in one-time fund transfers, including tapping all of the state’s rainy-day fund ($575 million, of which $238 million is spent and $337 million is left to comprise an unrestricted ending fund balance); and

• raises state spending to an unsustainable level of $34.51 billion, which is a $3.3 billion increase from current appropriations and equates to a 10.4 percent increase from 2011-13. That is approximately $1.95 million more the $32.56 billion the state expects to bring in. It is also $75 million higher spending than Gov. Jay Inslee proposed and nearly $1.2 billion more than the bipartisan, no-new-taxes Senate budget approved last week.

My initial reaction to the budget came last Wednesday, when the House budget was still just a proposal, and didn’t pull any punches:

“This budget not only increases taxes on our employers, it also breaks a promise made to them that the temporary tax increases from three years ago would be just that – temporary. Citizens and employers should not have to bail out state government overspending with new taxes. Rather than go straight to raising taxes, lawmakers should be willing to prioritize and make difficult decisions. That’s what the public told us it wants us to do – it’s time that House Democrats put on their big-boy pants and listen.”

I’m not saying it was a surprise to see such a big jump in spending and the heavy reliance on new taxes – I saw similar budgets from the majority as a member of the House over eight years ago, and the top leadership is the same today as it was then.

Still, it’s perplexing: the budget the Senate passed lives within our means – meaning no new taxes – and still pours more than a billion additional dollars into our public school system (there’s more detail in this opinion piece from me, published in Washington Focus). The House could have followed our lead, but instead, its appetite for spending and the tax hikes to support that spending could drive us into an overtime session. That would be downright insulting to the taxpayers of our state.

Senate plan wins hands-down when it comes to supporting college students

In last week’s Legislative Commentary I wrote about how I could see a future for higher education in the budget passed by the Senate because it supports the “Ten-Three-Fifty” plan two of my coalition colleagues introduced in March.

The House budget would dash that hope. It would spend $13 million less on higher education (than the Senate budget proposal) while allowing a 10 percent tuition increase at the University of Washington and Washington State University. The other two- and four-year institutions would also incur a tuition increase of six percent.

How can the Senate’s tax-free budget provide more funding that the plans from the House Democrats and the governor, with all their tax increases? And let’s see how the House plan would look in the real world: a UW resident student would pay $2,402 more over a two-year period. This would have the effect of decreasing the number of students who would be able to afford higher education and lengthening the amount of time it would take for them to complete a degree.

I choose to stand behind our coalition’s plan to cut tuition by three percent, stabilize the state’s Guaranteed Education Tuition program, and expand the State Need Grant to allow 4,300 additional eligible students to receive services. Again, as I noted last week, if our approach 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 can finally see a future without a tuition hike.