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Legislature Finally Shows Up for Work, But No Agreement in Sight

So Much for Big Breakthroughs – New House Democratic Proposal is a Placeholder

 

The House Ways and Means Committee holds a hearing on the House Democrats' reform bills Wednesday afternoon.

OLYMPIA, April 5.—Lawmakers finally showed up for work Wednesday with just six days to go in their current special session, but it looks like all talk of big breakthroughs was a bit hasty, and lawmakers might start thinking about spending springtime in the state’s capital city.

House Democrats released a new budget proposal that looks pretty much like their old one, and the coalition of Republicans and Democrats that rules the Senate quickly said they’re not even close to a deal. So the big bill remains an issue, as well as all the little ones – the reform measures that the Senate budget hawks are demanding as a way to bring long-term spending into line. The House Dems held hearings Wednesday on a slate of bills that might be described as reform-lite, and the Senate coalition said nothing doing.

“The longer we stay here, the less sustainable the budget they put out becomes,” said state Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield. The House Democrats’ proposal actually moved lawmakers farther apart, he said.

Curiously, the budget proposal released Wednesday by the majority Democrats in the House did not reflect any big changes, as might have been expected after the public show of goodwill Tuesday when Zarelli and House Speaker Frank Chopp shook hands after a closed-door meeting in the governor’s office. Instead, the new budget bill is something of a placeholder, intended at least to set something in motion and make it at least technically possible for lawmakers to adjourn on April 10, said Ross Hunter, D-Medina, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“We would like to have some visibility both for our caucus and for the public in terms of what our current offer is, and this is our current offer,” Hunter said.

Motion Without Movement

Actually, what the House Ds put on the bar of the chamber Wednesday was a negotiating position they had advanced last Friday. And it doesn’t look like they have budged much from the budget plan they passed on March 8.

The big issue, of course, is the billion-dollar shortfall that the state faces this year – as well as whether lawmakers will make course corrections this time around to avoid problems in future years. But the only significant change from last budget to this one is that the House Democrats have abandoned a plan to shift $330 million from the current two-year budget period to the next one, by delaying a payment to school districts. That plan has always been a nonstarter with the Senate coalition, because it would make next year’s $2 billion projected shortfall that much worse. And in fact, it was one of the big reasons for the takeover in the Senate March 2 by the band of 22 Republicans and three centrist Democrats. The leadership of the Senate Democratic Caucus wanted to do the same thing, and the budget hawks said it was the last straw.

In place of that budget-balancing gimmick, the House proposal embraces a proposal from Gov. Christine Gregoire that would change an obscure accounting procedure regarding the way tax money is distributed to state and local governments. Essentially the state would hang on to it a bit longer and would be able to realize a one-time benefit of $238 million.

That doesn’t raise quite as much as the old gimmick. And so the House Democrats make things balance by leaving a smaller amount of money in the bank, $336 million.

Beyond that, Hunter said, the budget is “similar in most of the details to the budget that we passed out on March 8. We changed some of the structural elements, and so a lot of the numbers in the balance sheet move around quite a bit, but this is mostly an effort to keep our process moving.”

Not Much of a Proposal, GOP Says

Hunter and the House Democrats are technically correct in saying that they had to do something now in order for the Legislature to have a bare chance of adjournment by April 10. The legislative process imposes significant delays that are intended to give the public and affected interest groups a change to review budget proposals before they are passed. There is supposed to be a 24-hour waiting period between the time a “striking amendment” is laid on the bar of the House to the time it can be advanced on the floor calendar, and then another 24 hour period before a final vote. Frequently those rules are waived in the name of expediency, however.

The key thing is that the entire 147-member Legislature had been told that it needed to show up Wednesday for the first time in the current 30-day special session. And this was as far as the House Democrats had gotten.

It’s a far cry from the “meet-‘em-halfway” budget that the Senate coalition announced March 15, however, and it further fueled arguments that the House Democrats are demonstrating disinterest in negotiating with the Senate rebels.  The reform bills that received hearings in the House Ways and Means Committee represent only modest steps toward the Senate positions on those issues as well. Among the top issues are K-12 health insurance, a requirement for a balanced budget, and pension reforms.

“I think this shows a good faith effort on our part to move forward with the reforms,” argued House Majority Leader Pat Sullivan. “The public expects us to get done within 30 days, and we felt we needed to get this process moving and that is why we are here.”

Gary Alexander, the House Republicans’ budget chief, retorted with a statement:

“If you’re really negotiating in good faith, you don’t present a ‘take it or leave it’ budget to the rest of the Legislature; you don’t resurrect extremely contentious, partisan bills that you know don’t have enough support to pass. If the majority party in the House insists on playing the same budget games they did during the regular session, we won’t move any closer to a budget agreement – to the detriment of the citizens of the state.”

Doesn’t Look Promising

One truism of the Legislature – you can be absolutely certain that the Legislature will adjourn by April 10. The only question will be whether it has to resume meeting in another special session to wrap up its work, or whether it can finish before then.

The lack of movement on the reform bills demonstrates there still is a big gulf, said state Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, one of the three Senate Democrats who voted with the Republicans. Take the balanced-budget debate. Kastama was prime mover behind the Senate proposal for a balanced budget constitutional amendment. It would require not only that the Legislature pass a balanced budget during its current budget period, but also that it doesn’t unbalance the next one – the sort of thing that the House D school-district payment plan would have done.

The House Democratic proposal instead is far weaker. It would add a requirement in state law that the Legislature pass a budget that balances at the time of passage, and says nothing about the next biennium. House Ways and Means staff said Wednesday that the state has never passed an unbalanced budget – they always meet that requirement.

So what you have is a proposal that actually does nothing, Kastama said, but gives the impression that it is doing something.

“Unless people work very hard, at this point I think we are going to be heading into an additional special session,” he said. “Is it possible that we could avoid that? Yes, it is possible because anything is possible in the Legislature when people put minds. But it isn’t probable.

“Let me just add that for those of us who took this opportunity to focus on the long-term sustainability of the budget, that is an absolute issue. We have to have a balanced budget now. We have to have a balanced budget on January 1 of next year, and we also have to have a budget that starts aligning long-term expenses with the revenue. And until that happens I don’t think you’re going to see anyone vote for a budget.”


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