The House will hold its first hearing Friday morning on a proposal to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for health care by boosting the sales tax about a third of a cent for three years. But as Olympia struggles to agree on a major tax plan to send to voters in November, they’re also talking about a lot of small things that will never appear on any ballot — but that are still likely to cost you.

Click the link below to read the story.

On the heels of a very similar post I wrote yesterday re: Washington State University’s budget cuts, here’s a closer look at the legislature’s proposals for Eastern Washington University.

The short form: It’s not as bad as it sounds.

“We are looking at an 18.5 to 22 percent reduction in funding,” EWU President Rodolfo Arévalo told the Spokesman-Review’s Kevin Graman yesterday.

Arevalo’s right, in terms of the state’s proposed contribution to the university’s budget. But fortunately for Eastern staffers and students, that’s not the whole picture.

Eastern’s current two-year budget is about $239 million. The state estimates that keeping the same programs, payroll, services etc. for the next two years would cost about $249 million. Salaries tend to rise, as do health care costs. Stuff costs more.

Eastern gets about half its money from the state treasury. And it’s true that lawmakers want to dramatically shrink their contribution to colleges during the current budget crisis. If this was a normal year, the state would pay $124 million to maintain current programs at Eastern. Instead, the Senate is proposing shaving $28 million from that.

Yikes.

And lawmakers are also assuming some pretty dramatic savings at Eastern: an 11 percent cut in administration, a 12 percent cut in non-instructional costs like libraries, groundskeeping, etc. (Those two cuts total about $10 million.)

But here’s some better news, at least for staffers: state budget writers say that a 7 percent tuition increase over the next two years would add nearly $9 million more to the college’s budget. For students, this works out to $306 a year more.

A little more good news: the federal government is expected to send Eastern another nearly $6 million in stimulus dollars.

Net result: Even after the Senate’s 18.5 percent cut in state support, Eastern’s total budget would be $235 million, instead of the $249 million maintenance-level budget.

To look at it another way, the budget for the next two years would be $4 million — or 1.6 percent — less than the last budget was.

As for students: yeah, 7 percent to 10 percent is a pretty big tuition hike. Some college officials argue that the boost would be offset by increases — particularly at the federal level — in financial aid, as well as federal tax breaks. Here’s a chart compiled by the University of Washington’s budget folks which maintains that for students from families with an income of $160,000 or less wouldn’t pay anything more even under a 14 percent tuition hike at UW (which means $875 more a year).

If you want to run the Eastern budget numbers yourself, here’s the Senate plan (see page 179). And here’s the House version (see page 186), which takes a deeper bite but would boost tuition 10 percent to offset it, with a virtually identical net result.

A day after the Senate, House lawmakers proposed a budget plan that cuts much deeper into higher education but spares K-12 education from some major cuts.

The House plan would strip $683 million from colleges, even while raising tuition at four-year schools 10 percent a year.

“We are asking them to take the biggest cut” despite the fact that the schools are engines of innovation and worker retraining, said Rep. Kathy Haigh, D-Shelton. “They will have to do the hardest work to figure out how to get through these tough times. But I know they can do it.”

The Senate plan, which would cut $513 million, is estimated to mean 2,500 fewer higher education jobs. House officials wouldn’t put a number on their proposal, saying they would leave it to the individual colleges to meet budget targets.

As for K-12 schools, the House would cut $625 million, compared to the Senate’s deeper $877 million in cuts. Much of that money would come from a voter-approved measure designed to shrink class sizes by hiring more teachers.

But even under the House plan, Haigh predicted, many teachers will lose their jobs.
“If we can keep other funds whole,” she said, “maybe we won’t lose more than 3- or 4,000 teachers.”

A top Senate budget writer, Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Medina, also estimates that 2,000 state workers will lose their jobs.

“This is not a very pleasant day for any of us,” said House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler.
Lawmakers will spend the next few weeks agreeing on a final plan.

State spending would still rise

Both budgets total about the same: $32.3 billion, compared to the $33.7 billion budget approved two years ago. That doesn’t include $2 billion to $3 billion more in expected federal help. And both the House and Senate budget would reduce state pension payments by hundreds of millions of dollars and use millions more in long-term construction dollars to support the operating budget.
In other words, the state will still be spending significantly more in this budget than in the last one.

“We now know where the Enron accountants turned up: writing this budget,” said Rep. Doug Erickson, R-Bellingham, criticizing the fact that that the federal aid wasn’t included in the budget.

“Today we got the status quo,” said Erickson, indicating the House budget. “We’re going to borrow more, we’re going to spend more, and we’re going to pass the debt on to our kids.”

He and other Republicans say the budget crisis was a chance for long-term spending reforms, but that majority Democrats resisted that. Over the past 4 years, state spending rose $8 billion. Republicans argue that the state must overhaul state spending to ease the burden on taxpayers and businesses.

“It’s really hard to imagine people who are having difficulty meeting payroll in their small businesses, and yet our state employees have one of the richest health care plans that’s out there,” said Rep. Barbara Bailey, R-Oak Harbor. “I find that just amazing.”

House budget writers said Tuesday that they tried to preserve basic education and the state’s social safety net, as well as state-subsidized health insurance for kids.

Taxpayers are likely to be asked for a tax increase to help avoid some of the cuts, said Rep. Kelli Linville, D-Bellingham. But what tax and how much have yet to be worked out.

Wherever possible, Haigh said, lawmakers want to set a budget amount and let school districts, state agencies and colleges figure out the best way to meet it. Many wanted that flexibility, lawmakers said.

“There was trickle-down economics,” said Haigh. “Well, this is trickle-down pain.”

UPDATE: Local higher-ed breakout:

How the House and Senate budgets would affect local universities:

Locally, Eastern Washington University would fare about the same under either plan, with about an 18.5 percent cut from what it would cost to maintain current programs. Washington State University would lose 17 percent to 18 percent. The deepest cuts under either budget would be at the University of Washington, which would lose $134 million under the House plan.

A day after Washington State University started to reveal its plans for handling proposed deep budget cuts, it’s time for another local school to do the same.

Late this afternoon in the Senate’s higher education committee, Eastern Washington University will detail how it would be affected.

In December, Gov. Chris Gregoire called for deep cuts to higher education spending as part of a broad plan to deal with a budget shortfall then estimated at $5.7 billion over the next two years. The Senate, worried about continuing erosion in state revenues, has asked the universities to model what it would look like to take cuts that are 50 percent larger than what Gregoire called for.

Yesterday, officials from both WSU and UW laid out their general plans under such cuts. Both are clearly expecting to raise tuition at least 7 percent over each of the next two years. Both predicted a drop in the number of expected student enrollments. And both said that while they would try to shield instructional programs from the brunt of the cuts, support services and administration would be cut deeply, and instructional fallout would be inevitable. UW President Mark Emmert suggested that it might take students 1-2 more quarters to get the courses they need to graduate.

From tomorrow’s paper:

Washington’s two largest public universities painted a bleak picture Tuesday of looming budget cuts as the state grapples with a budget shortfall that lawmakers say could reach $8 billion.

State lawmakers won’t finalize the budget for another two months, but state colleges and agencies have all been asked to show how they would deal with deep budget cuts.

The proposed cuts would mean “600 to 800 jobs, it’s a 2-6 percent decline in enrollment…and it’s 1-2 quarters of added time to degree,” University of Washington President Mark Emmert told lawmakers.

In Pullman, Washington State University officials are “doing our best to minimize the number of warm bodies that will lose their jobs,” Provost Warwick Bayly said. “But it is inevitable that there will be some.”

(Note: I included a TVW video of Bayly’s entire testimony in this post. Click on the “continue reading” link below for more of this story and the embedded video.)

Under Gov. Gregoire’s budget proposal, WSU would face a 12 percent cut in state funding. Boosting tuition by 7 percent – the current maximum – for the next two years would reduce that to just under 7 percent.

With Washington’s revenues getting steadily worse, state lawmakers have asked both institutions to draw up plans for even higher cuts: 50 percent more than what Gregoire called for. Cutting that 18 percent would mean WSU would have to slash $93 million from its budget over the next two years.

Officials from both schools said they’re not ready to name specific programs or services that definitely would be axed. But they sketched out the broad picture. At WSU, Bayly said, such cuts would reach deep – 41 percent — into WSU’s research and public service operations.

“We are trying to protect instruction to the extent that we can,” he said. Public services includes things like agricultural and natural resource outreach programs, nutritional services and small business development centers.

“They are all on the table and would in all likelihood be impacted by the reduction here,” Bayly said.

Also targeted in the plan: student services and administration. Student services includes things like recruiting, the registrar’s office, tutors and admissions.

“Each and every one of those may suffer to some extent,” Bayly said.

Both Emmert and Bayly said they would like to hold tuition increases to 7 percent a year, although Emmert argued that tuition increases of even 14 percent would be preferable to the