Gregoire meets with reporters Friday.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, April 9, 2010.—After three days of phone-calling, negotiation, arm-twisting and desperate pleading, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate still don’t have the votes to pass their budget and their tax package, a frustrated Gov. Christine Gregoire said Friday.

            That means a push by lawmakers to raise taxes by $801 million isn’t a done deal, and a frantic effort this weekend to wrap up the 2010 Legislature is going to be a nail-biter.

            For once lawmakers may be forced to take a vote without knowing the outcome in advance.

            “It’s possible,” Gregoire told reporters Friday.

            And in a chilling six-word sports metaphor that most often is used in cases of impending defeat, the governor hinted that everything might fall apart.

            “As I told [chief of staff] Marty Brown a little while ago, Yogi Berra – ‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over.’ “

            Fat Lady Isn’t Singing

Lawmakers are scheduled to return to Olympia Saturday to begin passing what lawmakers call their go-home package, which includes $801 million in new tax revenue and a budget deal that has yet to be announced. They have only a few days to wrap up their business. Their 30-day overtime session is set to expire Tuesday at midnight, and Gregoire said she is reluctant to call them back for another if it appears it will go as badly as this one.

But if they can’t reach agreement, that means Gregoire would be forced to order blunt 20 percent cuts in every state agency and department, to make up for the state’s $2.8 billion shortfall. The law wouldn’t allow her to finesse the matter as she and legislative leaders have been planning all session long – no raids on dedicated accounts, no quick fixes by spending one-time federal money, no cuts in less-important programs to allow others to survive intact. Nothing.

Yet right now the governor said it is proving impossible to line up enough Democratic votes in advance to assure that anything will pass.

She and legislative leaders have been pitching their plan to members all week, and the vote-count still doesn’t add up. All that she really has, she said, is an agreement between House Speaker Frank Chopp and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown.

  “I have been tireless. I have been relentless. I’ve tried everything. I can’t tell you how many senators I have talked to, or how many representatives I’ve talked to. For every one thing you say, will you agree to this? and they say yes, would you agree to that? they say no, when you talk to the next person they will say the exact opposite.

“So I tell them. you know, if somebody has a better deal, let me know.”

            Two Regressive Taxes

The April 13 deadline gives lawmakers just four days to wrap up their business – about the minimum amount of time that it takes for bills to be drafted, documents to be printed, and legislative deadlines to be met. The vast amount of procedural work that needs to take place in order to end the legislative session would be difficult to accomplish even if a deal was in place.

The full Senate was scheduled to meet Friday but cancelled its plans at the last second after the House announced that it would not meet until Saturday. The decision by Senate Democratic leaders came too late on Thursday night for many Eastern Washington members, who had already begun the arduous auto trip over the Cascades during wintry driving conditions that shut down Snoqualmie Pass for hours. But the vast majority of Eastern Washington members are Republicans, whose good will is unimportant in the session-ending scenario. Republicans don’t have the votes to affect the outcome and are opposed to tax increases anyway.

Meanwhile, the top Eastern Washington Democrat, Lisa Brown of Spokane, was already at her desk at the Capitol, making as many phone calls as the governor.

Rank-and file members say the problem with the tax deal is simple. Any way you slice it, it’s going to hit low-income people hard. Brown and her Senate Democrats had been holding out for a sales tax increase in the $100 million to $200 million range. That is considered a “regressive” tax because it takes a bigger percentage of low-income people’s salaries.

But the alternative, hatched by the House and the governor, may be even more regressive. The plan would raise taxes on candy, gum, soda pop and cheap beer – but not on yuppie microbrews. And all along, lawmakers in both houses have agreed that they will raise cigarette taxes. Those items are consumed by low-income people in the same or in even higher volumes than by rich folk.

            Governor Defends Plan

The governor told reporters there’s a big difference between whacking the poor with a sales tax and whacking the poor with “sin taxes.”

“I don’t want to be repetitive, but what I’ve said since December is that I don’t want to hurt our economic recovery, so that’s why I oppose the sales tax. I want to make sure whatever we did was as discretionary as it possibly could be, and so that’s why a pop tax, that’s why things like candy. For me they are discretionary.”

The governor also maintains that even a small increase in the sales tax would hit the construction industry hard and delay its recovery.

Gregoire said the plan she and the House put together offers the best chance of passage.

“If you take one piece out, you unravel it. I know that it may sound like a extreme view of it, but I can tell you I’ve spent my last three weeks dealing with this, and I can probably give you the vote counts on any single thing you raise with me. I can tell you how many yeses and how many nos.”

Sick of the Whole Thing

Mostly the governor said the whole long debate has worn her out. It might have been a mistake calling the Legislature back into session the moment the 60-day regular session expired, she said, but Brown and House Speaker Frank Chopp assured her that a deal was only days away.

If there isn’t an agreement, Gregoire said she would be required to make across the board cuts by the start of the next fiscal year, on July 1. But she said she’s not going to call lawmakers back for another special session unless they prove they have their act together.

 “I’ve learned my lesson,” she said.  I’m not calling a special session and having everybody sit around and look at each other. Nope, not on the taxpayers’ dime.”