Article by Erik Smith. Published on Friday, February 03, 2012 EST.

Reform to Budget-Writing Process Would Put K-12 Education Above All Else – Republicans Would Spend $584 Million More Than Gregoire

Left to right, House Republican Floor Leader Charles Ross and state Reps. Gary Alexander, Bruce Dammeier and Cathy Dahlquist.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, Feb. 3.—House Republicans presented the first legislative budget proposal of the session Thursday, albeit a partial one, as they touted a ‘Fund Education First’ scheme that would put K-12 spending ahead of everything else.

            It’s not just a budget. It’s a new way of writing them. The House Republicans are calling for a big change to the Legislature’s budget-writing process that would require lawmakers to draft an education budget first, and worry about the rest later. That ought to give education the emphasis it deserves, they say. And they underscored what they meant by presenting a spending plan that pumps $584 million more into K-12 schools than the only other budget plan seen thus far, the one presented by Gov. Christine Gregoire last November.

            Majority Democrats were quick to diss the plan, calling it political posturing of the highest sort and a silly way to write a budget. How can you make spending decisions for 45 percent of the state budget before you decide how much you’re going to spend on everything else?

            That’s the essence of the debate. The House Republicans are saying that’s the way it ought to be done. And while it might seem an argument about legislative process and procedure, what it’s really about is the big battle of the session, over a tax increase that will be sent to voters to at least partially fill the state’s $1.5 billion budget hole. Democrats are mulling a $500 million sales tax increase that would at least partially buy back some of the programs the Legislature is forced to cut. At least if you write a budget this way, Republicans say, you can be sure that K-12 education won’t be among them.

            “We will demonstrate to the people of the state of Washington where our first priorities are, and we won’t hold education hostage for tax increases,” said state Rep. Gary Alexander, the House Republican point-man on budget issues.

            Special Treatment for K-12

            At a news conference attended by House GOP budget and education leads, the lawmakers fleshed out their ‘Fund Education First’ plan, which they have been touting since the last legislative session. Essentially it would require the Legislature to write and pass an “education budget” before it makes any other decisions on anything else. So when it comes time to make cuts, as lawmakers will be forced to do this year, K-12 education wouldn’t be part of the balancing act as lawmakers decide how much to whack from prisons, colleges and universities, courts, law enforcement, social services and everything else that gets money from the state’s general fund budget.

            The spending plan Republicans presented would cut substantially less from K-12 education than Gregoire’s proposal. The governor advocates slashing $630 million in education spending from the two-year budget for 2011-13 approved by lawmakers last spring.

The House Republican education proposal would cut only $45.9 million. Their separate K-12 budget would allocate a total $13.7 billion for schools.

            The single biggest difference is that they reject a budget gimmick proposed by the governor that would delay a payment to school districts by a single day, thus pushing a $340 million expense into the next budget period.

Republicans also would fully fund levy equalization – the payments to property-poor school districts that are aimed to compensate for their inability to raise money for local taxes. They reject the governor’s proposal to shorten the school year by four days. But they would eliminate nearly all non-basic education programs, freeze “step increases” for teachers and other K-12 employees, and reduce the annual teacher bonus for national board certification.

They say they will present the rest of their budget proposals later in the session, demonstrating that the budget can be balanced without a tax increase. Exactly where they would cut is a detail to be provided later.

            No Way to Write a Budget

Democrats immediately dissed the plan, saying it is no way to write a budget. Indeed, the other big component of state-supported education, the state’s colleges and universities, are left out of the budgeting plan, meaning that higher education would be left in the dust with everything else. You just can’t consider K-12 education by itself at a time when everything has to be on the table, said Ross Hunter, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“This is a perfect illustration of why we can’t write a budget this way,” Hunter said. “What we know from this document is that it cuts less from the K-12 budget than Gov. Gregoire’s proposal did. But that’s about all we know.

“What is required to make this work? We don’t know. How will pension bills still in the pipeline affect this? We don’t know. Where does the money come from? We don’t know.

“Education is indeed our paramount duty. But it is not the only constitutional duty we have. Are those still being met? We don’t know.”

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, said the idea was a matter of feel-good political posturing. “Honestly, I feel like it’s more symbolism than substance,” she said. “On our side, a senator dropped a bill that said, fund higher education second. So where do we go with this? Fund public safety third?

“The reality is that the state of Washington needs to fund education, higher education, pre-kindergarten early learning programs, public safety, natural resources, courts – you know, there’s a broad spectrum of things that are not going to go away, and we don’t want them to go away. So when you say that you are funding one thing first and another thing second, the reality is that there are tradeoffs in terms of what gets funded.

“If you fund education first and pretend there are no tradeoffs with everything else, I think that is a little bit of a bait and switch.”

Proposal is D.O.A.

Though Republicans insist their idea would enjoy broad support if it ever made it to the House and Senate floors, it doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon. A policy bill that would launch the new “Fund Education First” budgeting procedure already has been shot down in committee. House Bill 2533 still hasn’t gotten a vote in the House Education Appropriations and Oversight Committee, and since there is a deadline today for passage of policy bills in House budget committees, and the Friday meeting of the panel has been canceled – that just isn’t going to happen.

But House Republican floor leader Charles Ross, R-Naches, said the GOP will continue to push the idea by every means available – and under the rather loose rules of the Legislature, there are plenty of ways to do it. “We plan to use every procedural opportunity to continue to bring this idea up, and there is a fully funded education budget out there that we can start working on at any moment,” he said.

            A Constitutional Argument

K-12 education deserves special treatment, said state Rep. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup, the ranking Republican on the House Education Committee. He noted that the Supreme Court held in 1978 that “basic education” is the state’s paramount duty, based on what he called “clear and unambiguous” language in the state constitution. What it meant, in the court’s view, was that the state must fully fund basic K-12 education as its top priority after debt service, pensions and other financial obligations. That decision was reaffirmed Jan. 5 in another Supreme Court ruling that basically said the state isn’t meeting its obligation.

            “The [recent] McCleary decision was particularly poignant,” he said. “At one point it said that it is our responsibility to fund the education of all children in the state of Washington as our first and highest priority, above all of the state programs and services. In a nutshell, I would say that our children deserve our first dollar, not our last.”

            The Supreme Court’s 1978 ruling has been questioned for decades by lawmakers and many others because it was based on a single sentence in the constitution that might just as well have been read as a bit of flowery rhetoric from 1889. Those doubts have been somewhat muted by the fact that education programs are popular with voters. But Dammeier said the argument for an education budget ought to be seen as more than a matter of legal compliance. “Our forefathers recognized that education is the foundation of a successful democracy and is the key to our economic prosperity,” he said.

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