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OFM Won’t Rewrite Estimate for Home Care Ballot Measure – How Much Does I-1163 Cost, Anyway?

Article by Erik Smith. Published on Friday, September 02, 2011 EST.

Maybe $37 Million, Backers Say – But You Won’t Find the Number in the Voters’ Pamphlet


 

SEIU home-care workers rally at the state Capitol.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

 

OLYMPIA, Sept. 2.—The state budget office says it spoke plain English when it wrote a “fiscal impact statement” for a union-backed home-care training measure that appears on the November ballot – and it’s not going back for a rewrite.
            But you might say the state Office of Financial Management has some pretty harsh literary critics in the campaign against Initiative 1163. They say the cost estimate reads like government gobbledygook, and it left out kind of an important detail – how much the program actually costs.
            Backers say it makes perfect sense to them.

            There isn’t a voter in the state who will be able to make sense of the lengthy statement that will appear in the Washington voters’ pamphlet this election season about the cost of I-1163, complains Cindi Laws, chairwoman of the ‘no’ campaign. Any soul who manages to slog through it will get the idea that the program is cheap. Not that anyone is likely to get past the first few sentences, she says – it certainly isn’t written in the plain English that the law requires.

“This just defies common sense,” she says.

            Good writing might be in the eye of the beholder, but the complaint does raise a question about the measure. How much will the home-care training program cost, anyway? You won’t find the answer in the voters’ pamphlet, but the best guess from its proponents is somewhere in the neighborhood of $37 million during the first two years. Taxpayers would face a similar ongoing expense in the years after that.

 

            Plain English?

 

            Back when lawmakers told the state budget office to start writing fiscal estimates in 2002, the idea was that voters needed an easy-to-understand assessment of how much ballot measures actually cost. Voters had just passed two enormously expensive ballot measures – initiatives 728 and 732, which mandated big spending increases for teacher salaries and class-size reductions. Neither of them raised taxes or otherwise provided a dime to pay for themselves, and frustrated lawmakers decided there had to be a better way.

            The law directs the Office of Financial Management to write its fiscal impact statements in “clear and concise language,” to put things “in context,” and to “avoid legal and technical terms where possible.” It states flatly that OFM is to discuss any increases or decreases in state costs if an initiative is passed. 

            Trouble is, I-1163 is a little more complicated than your typical initiative. The measure is sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly all of the 40,000 home-care workers who work directly for the state or for vendors under state contract. The measure re-enacts a home-care training program that was launched by another SEIU initiative back in 2008, but which the cash-strapped Legislature keeps on postponing for lack of money.

            So what happened is this. In its official estimate, the state budget office compared the new initiative with the never-funded law that is already on the books. It noted that a few of the implementation dates would change, and it concluded that the additional, incremental cost would be $31 million over six years. But that doesn’t reflect the full cost of the program. And nowhere in the dense four-page explanation is that mentioned.

 

            Everyone’s a Critic

 

            At the very least, the state ought to point out that those are additional costs, not the whole enchilada, says Laws, the director of the state adult-family-home association. Her group and private home-care agencies have been screaming bloody murder ever since the original initiative made the ballot three years ago. The state has to pay for training for the public-sector workers, but they account for only about two-thirds of the workforce. The private sector is subject to the same costly requirements, and those workers are on their own.

Which explains why Laws wrote to the Office of Financial Management last week, urging that the office take another whack.

             But in a letter Thursday from the state budget office, director Marty Brown rejected the request. And not just that. He said the statement complies with both the “letter and spirit” of the law.

            There’s a bit of parsing over the wording, and a discussion of whether the statement is “unduly legal or technical.” But Brown says it’s clear enough. “If a cost ‘increases,’ it necessarily means that the new costs are above and beyond those costs required by current law,” he said.

            And he says there’s no duty to explain what that current law is, or how much it costs. “Because I believe the statement complies with the statutory requirements, it will not be withdrawn,” Brown said.

 

            An Utter Abomination’

 

            OFM is most likely on sound legal footing. Ultimately the law leaves decisions to Brown’s office – it’s not as if it has an editor.

            But Laws says the whole thing stinks. “No one in government should expect that if you say ‘current law,’ that some citizen, John Q. Public, sitting on his couch or at his kitchen counter, is going to go to the Revised Code of Washington and try to figure out what is current law,” she said. “You have no idea where to look, unless you are a lobbyist tuned in on this very narrow issue. I find it an utter abomination of what the statute says, that the fiscal note shall be clear and concise.”

            At a time when the state faces a shortfall next year of perhaps $2 billion, she says voters deserve to know the price tag really is.

 

            A $37 Million Program

 

            That’s one of the strange things about the training program. There really has never been an estimate of the state’s actual costs over the long haul. The closest was a fiscal note last February, on an early version of a bill that delayed the training requirements once again. That OFM estimate indicated that, under the old rules, the cost to taxpayers would be about $51 million for the first two years. But because of the way that bill was written, the cost estimate didn’t look any further into the future.

            So what’s the real number? Sandeep Kaushik, spokesman for the yes-on-1163 campaign, said the calculations will change if the ballot measure passes. That’s because some of the training requirements are delayed until 2016. If you take some of the changes in the new fiscal note and subtract them from the old one, and then you add a few new auditing requirements that 1163 imposes, you get a figure somewhere around $37 million in the first two years.

            Costs would rise in future years as all workers fall under the training requirements. But Kaushik notes that the federal government would pay a large chunk of the money, because Medicaid provides matching funds – somewhat more than half.

           

            Makes Perfect Sense

 

Kaushik says OFM was just doing its job when it wrote that fiscal estimate. It calculated new costs – that’s how they always work. “It seemed pretty clear to me,” he said. “This fiscal note was showing that the new cost, if the initiative were to pass, is going to be $13 million over the next biennium to state taxpayers.”

            The yes-on-1163 might have a complaint as well, he said. The estimate doesn’t show that state nursing home costs are reduced if the state home-care program is strong, he said. But OFM estimates don’t do that type of dynamic analysis.

            “We can quibble with the terms of OFM’s fiscal note, but I will say that it has always been my experience that OFM has always tried to act as an impartial, non-partisan independent arbiter of the fiscal impacts of these ballot measures,” he said. “I think they did so in this case. We appreciate the fact that they stood up to the attempt by the other side to bully them into producing a skewed and flawed fiscal note.”


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