Members of the Caseload Forecast Council hear the latest report Wednesday. Attending the meeting were Reps. Jeannie Darnielle, D-Tacoma, and Gary Alexander, R-Olympia, as well as Robin Arnold-Williams, secretary of the Department of Social and Health Services.

OLYMPIA, June 28.—Another state forecast – the one that doesn’t get quite so much attention – has given the state the tiniest bit of room for error as it tries to sail through the budget straits this summer.

But one jog on the wheel, and the state still might slam into the rocks.

What happened is that a new report from the state Caseload Forecast Council, issued Wednesday, indicated that the demand for state services is just a tad lower than it projected a quarter ago. The overall cost to the state general fund is down $55.6 million. If you add that amount to the state tax-revenue forecast, which was issued last week to great fanfare, you get a total safety margin of $78.3 million.

That’s not a lot of money in a state budget that runs $31.1 billion. It’s about three-tenths of a percent of the total state spending plan for 2011-13. One blast of wind from Europe or Washington, D.C. is all that it will take to push the rudder off course, and lawmakers could find themselves facing another big shortfall, the way they have every year since 2009.  But it’s good enough for government work, and it means they can take the summer off. Most will spend it running for re-election.

Measures Demand for State Services

The caseload forecast is the state’s unsung budget-planning document. It’s the one that measures K-12 school enrollment, the demand for social services, prison populations and everything else the state pays for. The quarterly report was issued Wednesday during a meeting at the state Capitol. What it showed was the demand for state services had dropped just a tad since the last forecast.

Projected K-12 school enrollment was down by about 1,000 students for 2011-2012, for example, and it will be down about 2,000 next fall. Not much out of a million students statewide, but still it’s something.

The biggest decline is in Medicaid costs. That’s down $20 million. About $5 million of the savings is because the state is transitioning those on the state’s Disability Lifeline program to other government programs.

The most striking increase, meanwhile, comes in the state’s K-12 bilingual education program. In the 2012-2013 school year, participation will grow by 4,700 students and will amount to 9.5 percent of total school enrollment. That’s because the state is adopting a new English-language proficiency test – the Washington English Language Proficiency Assessment – and more students are expected to shunted into bilingual programs as a result.

Breathing Room

Lawmakers didn’t leave much wiggle room in April, when they spent just about every penny in projected revenue that was available to them. Budget-writers of both parties started last session by saying they would have liked to leave a reserve of about a half-billion dollars. Instead, to satisfy political demands, they left about $39 million of general-fund revenue unspent when they finally passed a budget in April and the governor vetoed a handful of spending cuts. That got trimmed last week when new economic numbers came out.

There’s also $265 million in the state’s “rainy day” account. But to tap it, lawmakers would have to come back into session — something they are loath to do, and doubly so in the middle of an election season.

So the caseload forecast gives them a bit more breathing room – a couple of gasps, anyway. Though the state’s economic forecast office noted that there is a 40 percent chance things might go sour, largely because of the European debt crisis and doubts about the ability of Congress to deal with some rather taxing issues.

“It’s good news, although that bilingual program is a little troubling,” said state Rep. Gary Alexander, R-Olympia, a member of the Caseload Forecast Council and the lead Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. “We’ve got to keep an eye on that; it is an expensive potential increase. But I am very pleased with the fact that as the Disability Lifeline was phasing out, we moved those people into a program where they would qualify for Social Security benefits and full federal funding. That’s good. It means we are still serving them, but it means that we are serving them in a way that saves the state money.”

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