The $787 billion economic stimulus bill to be signed tomorrow by President Obama “is not the end of what we need to do,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said Monday.

She said the package, which includes billions for transportation, education, unemployment benefits and other help, was the best compromise on a controversial plan. But more remains to be done, she said, to shore up the banking industry and deal with the rapid increase in home foreclosures. Members of Congress have been warned that Obama’s budget proposal, to be released soon, will be a tough budget “in terms of cutbacks,” she said.

Murray was in Olympia Monday, meeting with Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, House Speaker Frank Chopp and other state officials.

The plan will help state budget writers somewhat. It includes $2 billion in new money for Medicaid, $2 billion for cleanup work at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as well as $812 million in state stabilization money, most of it for education.

“That was a significant debate,” Murray said of the stabilization money. Key lawmakers, she said, were concerned about accountability over how that state money gets spent.

“There was a lot of concern among them about sending money out to the state that wasn’t going to be accountable, and having, a year from now, midnight basketball thrown back at us if that’s what the money was spent for,” she said.

And with the state wrestling with a budget shortfall estimated at at least $6 billion, Murray said that state lawmakers will still have tough choices to make. Lawmakers were clearly hoping for more state dollars, she said, but are grateful for the federal help nonetheless.

Some $500 million in new cash for the state’s roads and bridges will be largely up to the state Department of Transportation and local transportation authorities to divide up, she said.

But Murray urged patience, saying the money will take time to work its way into the economy.
“I think my worst fear is people are going to think things are better next Friday,” she said. Some economists, she cautioned, say that the stimulus might not start turning around the economy until the end of the year.

“But the alternative of doing nothing,” she said, “we would see an impact almost immediately.

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, writing on her blog, says that the federal stimulus bill “is not a state bailout bill.”

The money it includes for state “is just not big enough to make up for the deep dive our state revenues have taken” she writes. And the Senate version had less than originally proposed for both state budgets and building/renovating schools. Writes Brown:

The tax cuts in the bill are popular and everyone could use a little extra cash, but from an economic stimulus perspective, direct infrastructure investment would create more jobs and more flexible allocations to states would save more jobs.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and Brown’s Republican colleagues have both said that they’re frustrated by Democratic legislative leaders’ slow pace enacting cuts. Brown has said that she didn’t want to cut people off of health care or aid, for example, only to find out later that federal help or changing economic news rendered those cuts unecessary.

Two key numbers will come next week, Brown writes. On Monday, President Obama’s slated to sign the final version of the stimulus bill. And on Thursday (Brown says Tuesday in the blog post), the state’s economic weather forecasters will deliver an unusual early “preliminary forecast” of state revenues.

Brown’s clearly not expecting good news, writing that those two numbers will give lawmakers critical information “about how much larger our budget-writing challenge is than the one facing the governor just two months ago.” She writes:

“That’s when our conversation with the public about a positive direction forward will begin in earnest.”

What’s that mean? Turning to the public and asking for support of at least some additional taxes in order to support critical programs. Unlike Gregoire, who pledged — and delivered — a no-new-taxes budget proposal, Brown has for months been hinting that the solution the state’s deep budget woes is likely to include some tax increases. That, after all, is what’s happened in Olympia in every other economic downturn for the past 40 years.

And Brown is convinced that voters, if shown the need, will support paying more. In late 2002, for example, Washingtonians supported a 9-cent gas tax increase and vehicle sales tax hike in order to raise billions of dollars for transportation projects across the state. They voted to make it easier for schools to raise property taxes. Locally, voters in Spokane have increased their own taxes to pay for mental health treatment, and in Central Puget Sound, as recently as December, they’ve done the same thing for rail and transportation projects.

Brown is largely sticking to a course of action she laid out more than two months ago at a legislative forum hosted by Greater Spokane Inc., a local business group.  In this clip, watch how she responds to budget criticism from Rep. Bill Hinkle, a Republican from Cle Elum.

(Tech note: This works in Internet Explorer and Safari; I haven’t gotten it to work in Firefox. Also, to replay this clip, hit refresh on your browser first.)

The White House has posted a list of what President Obama’s stimulus plan would mean for Washingtonians.

It doesn’t detail some of the major investments in education and transportation infrastructure that’s being planned. It’s more of a consumer’s-eye-view of the plan.

From it:

•
Creating or saving 79,700 jobs over the next two years. Jobs created will be in a range of industries from clean energy to health care, with over 90% in the private sector. [Source: White House Estimate based on Romer and Bernstein, “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” January 9, 2009.]
•
Providing a making work pay tax cut of up to $1,000 for 2,450,000 workers and their families. The plan will make a down payment on the President’s Making Work Pay tax cut for 95% of workers and their families, designed to pay out immediately into workers’ paychecks. [Source: White House Estimate based on IRS Statistics of Income]
•
Making 67,000 families eligible for a new American Opportunity Tax Credit to make college affordable. By creating a new $2,500 partially refundable tax credit for four years of college, this plan will give 3.8 million families nationwide – and 67,000 families in Washington – new assistance to put college within their reach. [Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of U.S. Census data]
•
Offering an additional $100 per month in unemployment insurance benefits to 404,000 workers in Washington who have lost their jobs in this recession, and providing extended unemployment benefits to an additional 44,000 laid-off workers. [Source: National Employment Law Project]
•
Providing funding sufficient to modernize at least 138 schools in Washington so our children have the labs, classrooms and libraries they need to compete in the 21st century economy. [Source: White House Estimate]

Hat tip: Jerry Cornfield.

Echoing similar plans in the other Washington, Senate Democrats in Olympia Tuesday detailed their plans to combine “green jobs” with a renewed push for conservation and alternative sources of power.

“We now have a partner in the federal government in a way that we haven’t had a partner in the past,” said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. The Obama administration wants to spend $150 billion and create 5 million new jobs over the next decade with clean-energy efforts.

In Olympia, some of the proposals touted Tuesday were low-tech, like boosting efforts to weatherize drafty homes.

Others look further into the future. With some help from tax breaks, for example, Sen. Fred Jarrett said, he envisions electrical charging stations dotting Interstate 5 “from Vancouver to Tijuana.” When the parking lots full of charged cars aren’t driving, he said, they can be tapped as a massive battery to feed electricity back into the power grid at peak times.

Sen. Tracey Eide, D-Federal Way, wants to reduce driving by encouraging auto insurers to offer some insurance plans linked to miles driven.

Among the skeptics: Todd Myers, who works for a conservative think tank called the Washington Policy Center. Lawmakers are gambling millions of dollar clutching at the latest “eco-fads,” he said, when they should be encouraging the private sector for better fixes.

“They were wrong on electric cars, biofuels and green buildings,” he said. “Now they want to create charging stations. But a few years back they were talking about the hydrogen highway.”
Myers thinks a better solution would be to charge people for their carbon emissions – encouraging them to limit the pollution – and spend the money on tax breaks to encourage innovation.

“These decisions are not best made in Olympia, Myers said. “They’re best made in Redmond, Seattle and the rest of the state.”