Article by Erik Smith. Published on Sunday, April 17, 2011 EST.

Shocking Truth Dawned on Everyone Last Week – Legislature Just Can’t Get its Work Done On Time

 

Gov. Christine Gregoire speaks with reporters Friday.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, April 17.—Seemed like everyone finally figured it out this last week – the state Legislature just can’t get done on time, and there’s going to be a special session.

            The fact that the Legislature and Olympia’s entire political world took the weekend off ought to be a good clue. Last week lawmakers conceded there’s too much work and too little time. On Friday the governor made it all but official, when she said she’d finally given up on the idea that the Legislature will wrap up its business April 24, just seven days from now.

            Gregoire told reporters she called legislative leaders into her office and they told her there was just no way.

“I think it’s unfortunate, and I hope that doesn’t discourage them from working and working hard, as they’ve got a lot of work to get done.”

            As for the timing – that’s still up in the air. The only thing left to be settled is whether lawmakers come back to work on Monday April 25, the day after their regular 105-day session ends. Maybe they’ll get a week off.

            Reporters’ Favorite Sport

            Before you start chalking this one up as a failure, you have to remember that the 105-day limit is about as arbitrary as they come. It came about in 1979, when lawmakers drafted a constitutional amendment to govern the length of sessions. The old way of doing things – 60 days every two years – just didn’t work anymore. The last year lawmakers had finished on time was 1957, and they’d also gotten into the habit of meeting in even-numbered years to clean up the mess they’d left the year before.

            Some folks thought three months was about right, for the odd-numbered years in which lawmakers have to write a budget. Some folks thought four months was better. So they split the difference down the middle and came up with 105.

            The big thing to remember is that there’s nothing magic about that number. It has nothing to do with the issues lawmakers have to consider. It just gives them something to shoot for. Some years they make it and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes, when things fall apart at the last minute, there really doesn’t seem to be much excuse. But it’s different this year. Lawmakers have to cut an enormous $3 billion from state spending, and no one really expected them to settle that argument fast.

            Lobbyists have been betting on a special session for months.

            Yet whenever a special session is called, there’s always harrumphing about the expense – as much as $18,000 a day – and the abject failure of legislative leadership that places lawmakers in the sorry position of having to take a $90 per diem, or having to turn it down for the sake of appearances.

            A special session also provides one of those delightful sports for reporters – asking legislative leaders where they screwed up.

            It Was Those Other Guys

“What went wrong?” asked Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown. “The economy. The economy went really, really down, the greatest recession since the Great Depression.

            “But on the other hand, the process for putting together a bipartisan budget and a fairly collaborative way with the policy chairs of education, higher education and human services is a more time-consuming process than some budget processes we’ve had in the past.”

            What she’s talking about is the fact that the Senate Democrats this year brought Republicans into the room when they started writing the budget. They didn’t have much choice – Democrats have only a narrow majority in the Senate, and their more moderate members might have bolted if they hadn’t. But Brown might not be giving the Senate budget-writers enough credit. They released their budget proposal last week right on schedule, a few days after the House.

            The House Democrats, meanwhile, were supposed to go first. They delayed the release of their own budget proposal by about a week. House Republicans weren’t invited to help with that one. The problem was that the House Democrats had trouble coming up with a budget-cut plan that 50 of their own members would support. They finally found a neat solution when they conjured up an extra $300 million.

They got it by proposing the state lease out its liquor-distribution system for 20 years, but they still haven’t put that one in writing.

            Late Budget to Blame

            When you wait until the last three weeks of a legislative session to get the ball rolling on the biggest bill of the session, you’re asking for trouble. The House budget requires the passage of 64 policy bills, most of them goring one interest group or another.

            “I don’t see how we can possibly do it,” Senate Republican Leader Mike Hewitt warned last Wednesday. “Not even all the bills are drafted yet.”

The Senate budget requires almost as many. And if the problems in the House didn’t make things clear enough, the Senate budget, released late Tuesday night, made it obvious.

The Senate budget takes on the Washington Education Association, one of the 800-pound gorillas of state politics, with teacher pay cuts and a new approach to K-12 health benefits that cuts the union out of the health-insurance business, eliminating a big source of its revenue. There’s another Senate bill, too, that would lay off teachers based on poor performance rather than seniority. A three-front war with the WEA isn’t the sort of thing that can be resolved in a week and a half.

             The late start on the budget in the House doomed everything, said Senate Republican Floor Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville. The mechanics of passing bills and hammering out the differences required at least an extra week. “When that budget came out one or two weeks later than historically it should, it makes the process very difficult to achieve,” he said.

            Worker Comp, Tax Exemptions on Table

            What the special session really means is more time to fight. The governor says she still wants action on a worker-comp bill – apparently scuttled by the House Democrats late last week. And Senate Democrats appeared to be counting on a special session last Thursday when they rolled out a package of bills to cut business tax exemptions.

            At a news conference, state Sen. Phil Rockefeller said, “There may be an opportunity if we do move into a special session to consider those [bills], because the special sessions are not subject to the same cutoff limitations.”

            They’re not the only ones who see the special session as an opportunity. Jerry Reilly, lobbyist for the Eldercare Alliance, has been arguing for a special session ever since he saw the social-service cuts the House and Senate were proposing. “We’re heading toward an all-cuts budget with only a slight accommodation between the House and the Senate,” he said. The longer the Legislature meets, he argues, the more time there might be to head it off.

            Should Have Started Sooner

            Where the Legislature went wrong, says state Rep. Mike Armstrong, R-Wenatchee, is that people just plain waited too long. “They didn’t start early enough. Big surprise – we had a little bit of a budget crunch and they just didn’t start early enough. They should have seen this coming.

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