Article by Erik Smith. Published on Tuesday, December 13, 2011 EST.
Fast Action on House and Senate Floors Will Get Lawmakers Home for Holidays<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com: Free My Ex Gf office:office” />
In center, House Ways and Means Chair Ross Hunter, D-Medina, stretches back Monday to chat with Gary Alexander, R-Olympia.
By Erik Smith
Staff writer/ Washington State Wire
OLYMPIA, Dec. 13.—The Washington Legislature is poised to pass a $479 million budget bill this week that dodges the big questions, but manages to accomplish one important thing – it gets lawmakers out of Dodge.
The budget measure, a cobbled-together collection of cuts, accounting gimmicks and one-time revenue, does the easy stuff first. But the hard part – filling the rest of the state’s $2 billion budget hole – is left for the regular legislative session that starts Jan. 9.
That one is set to run 60 days, but at the rate the current Legislature is moving, lawmakers may be in town considerably longer.
The budget measure was unveiled Monday as the third week of the Legislature’s special session got under way. With any luck, lawmakers say, they’ll be able to adjourn by the end of the week – some say the final gavel might even fall on Thursday.
House Bill 2058 will get a vote this morning in the House Ways and Means committee and is expected to be taken up by the full House later in the day, said chairman Ross Hunter, D-Medina. An identical measure, SB 5883 also has been introduced and may be acted upon by the Senate.
Hunter said the bills are the result of negotiations between budget-writers in the House and Senate. “It’s somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the shortfall, and it is the set of things that were the least controversial of all the things that we are eventually going to reduce,” Hunter said.
There’s some pain now, and there’s going to be more later, he said.
‘Low-Hanging Fruit’
What it means is that the Legislature is essentially adopting the same strategy it did last year, when it faced another big shortfall. Lawmakers passed a few quick cuts to the state budget during a one-day special session in December, and then came back to finish the job in January.
The main difference is that it took them three weeks to reach the same point this year. What happened is that Gov. Christine Gregoire called lawmakers back to Olympia Nov. 28 with the rather ambitious goal of rewriting the entire two-year state budget they passed last spring. It took a couple of weeks for lawmakers to throw up their hands and say it couldn’t be done.
Legislative leaders said last week that the issues involved in whacking the budget are so big that no agreement is possible in a short amount of time. And it’s really a bit of a standoff. A big bloc of Democrats are planning to send a tax-increase proposal to the ballot sometime next year, and they say they won’t support an all-cuts budget until the tax plan is ready. Meanwhile, another big bloc of Republicans and moderate Democrats are demanding big reforms in state government before the tax referendum can go through. They haven’t finalized the list, and at any rate, such things are likely to take weeks to debate.
Thus a standoff becomes a standstill.
And that new budget bill? Well, it’s something, anyway, says House Republican budget chief Gary Alexander, R-Olympia.
“We are at least taking some step before we go home,” he said. “I believe that this may sort of be the low-hanging fruit, but it is a good start. It will be a bipartisan solution, and we will pass this, and we will go for the holidays. And hopefully we will come back and address the real challenges in January.”
What it Does
The ‘skinny budget’ doesn’t really make the big changes to state spending that would make the state budget sustainable in future years – the essence of the upcoming debate. In cuts it makes a whack of only $226 million to existing state programs.
It assumes another $97 million in savings from reductions in caseloads and other changes to what budget writers call the “maintenance level.”
It “captures” $83 million in unspent money given to state agencies in the last budget.
Other fund transfers amount to $24 million.
The final item requires a separate bill. Lawmakers are contemplating a more aggressive effort to capture “unclaimed property” – basically bank accounts and safety-deposit-box contents left behind by people who have died. That’s good for $51 million, state officials say, though of course heirs may always make a claim for the return of the property.
Nitty Gritty Details
Among other things, the budget bill would:
· Cut a half-million dollars from the budget for the state library, reducing funds available for an online library system, and closing a library at the state penitentiary at Walla Walla.
· TVW, the state’s public-affairs TV network, would get a $300,000 cut, forcing the channel to lay off staff during the interims between legislative sessions and reducing coverage of meetings outside Olympia.
· A $50 million school-bus depreciation payment to school districts would be delayed from Oct. 2012 to Aug. 2013, meaning that the expense would be pushed into the next two-year budget.
· The Puget Sound Partnership would reduce grants to environmental groups and other organizations that assist in development of its “action agenda.” The cut would save $242,000.
· Plans to expand the detention and commitment of the mentally ill would be delayed from Jan. 2012 to July 2015. That change would save $23 million.
Alexander said the Republicans will propose amendments to the budget bill that would push the total value to about $500 million. They include adoption of a Gregoire proposal to “capture” about $16 million in savings from underutilized health insurance programs for state employees.
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