By Jerry Cornfield
The (Everett) Herald
A new state budget was on its way to Gov. Jay Inslee Friday evening after the House of Representatives passed the two-year spending plan.
The vote was 70-23.
“It was a long and arduous and difficult process but in the end we have a budget I am very proud of,” said Rep. June Robinson, D-Everett, one of a handful of lawmakers in budget negotiations.
The Democrat-controlled House and Republican-led Senate reached agreement early Wednesday following months of inaction and a sometimes bitter impasse. It came on the eighth day of the third special session and with the prospect of an unprecedented government shutdown looming.
The actual budget document didn’t become public until early Friday and received no public hearing before lawmakers voted.
Several Republican representatives spoke against the bill, saying it contains an unsustainable level of spending. What is funded is good, they said, but lawmakers are trying to do too much in this two-year cycle.
“Frankly, as we go forward, if this becomes unsustainable, it scares me,” said Rep. Morgan Irwin, R-Enumclaw. “What will be cut first.”
Inslee, in a statement issued Friday morning, praised it for fully funding education without trimming health care and social services. Once Inslee receives it, his staff said he will spend several hours reviewing it before acting.
The state Senate passed the spending plan on a 39-10 vote before the Senate took up the measure.
“This is a solid, decent budget,” said Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent. “But we need more time to read and think and understand what is in it.”
The two-year $43.7 billion budget was released early Friday, giving lawmakers only a few hours to comb through the 616-page document and get it to Inslee in time for him to sign by midnight to avert a temporary halt in state services and the layoff of 32,000 state employees Saturday. That is the first day of the new budget cycle.
“This is a historic budget,” Inslee said in a statement issued Friday. “When I rolled out my budget proposal in December, I said that I would judge the success of this session on two things: whether we fully fund education and do so without cutting services that protect the health and safety of vulnerable Washingtonians and families. This budget does both.”
On the spending side, the budget injects $1.8 billion into public schools as part of a comprehensive plan to satisfy a state Supreme Court mandate on education funding.
Justices ruled in 2012 that the state system of funding public schools was unconstitutional. In what is known as the McCleary case, they made clear the state needed to provide ample funding from a reliable and sustainable source and to ensure school districts no longer rely on local property tax levies to pay employee salaries and other basic education expenses.
Most of the new dollars in the proposed budget will cover the portion of teacher salaries school districts are now paying.
The proposed budget also includes $618 million to pay for new state worker contracts and $75 million for higher education, two-thirds of which will go to provide financial aid to nearly 900 more college students.
There’s also $102 million to improve Washington’s mental health system. Some of the money will be used to make changes at Western State Hospital which are necessary to avoid a cutoff of federal funds to the psychiatric hospital.
Another $26.7 million is provided for crisis centers and community long-term inpatient beds, and $17.7 million is provided to increase the number of beds available in community treatment settings for patients discharged from state psychiatric hospitals.
Under this budget, a new Department of Children, Youth and Families will be created, combining the Department of Early Learning and the Children’s Administration, a division of the Department of Social and Health Services.
There’s $25.1 million to expand the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program by 1,800 slots, as well as money to increase cash assistance grants to needy families and fund services for the homeless.
Overall, the $43.7 billion in spending in the next budget is $5.2 billion more than the current one. That’s nearly a 12 percent increase.
And more than half of the budget, $22 billion, will be spent on the state’s K-12 public school system, according to analyses compiled by nonpartisan staff of the House and Senate budget committees. Another $3.8 billion will go to higher education institutions and financial aid.
The second largest piece, $14 billion, is for the Department of Social and Health Services and health care and human services programs provided through other state agencies.
To pay for the increased spending, the budget counts on $1.6 billion from hiking the state property tax to $2.70 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, an 81-cent increase from the current level. It also counts on $456 million in revenue from a new tax on online purchases made through eBay and similar firms, and ending a sales-tax exemption on bottled water and extracted fuels, which affects oil companies.
The budget is balanced in part by relying on $898 million of the state’s reserves and a transfer of $254 million from the Public Works Assistance Account.
Full details of the budget can be found online at www.leap.leg.wa.gov or fiscal.wa.gov.
