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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spin Control

How a $2 billion hole appeared in the state budget between midnight and dawn

OLYMPIA — To explain the current state of the Washington Legislature, forget the philosophy of Rousseau, the ideas of Jefferson or the eloquence of Lincoln and turn instead to the dictum of Berra.

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over. For the Legislature, it definitely ain’t over.

The Senate failed shortly after dawn Wednesday to change state law to prevent a $2 billion hole from opening up in the 2015-17 operating budget.

Senate Democrats said they were trying to balance a negative for the state’s school children on crowded classrooms with a positive on easing test requirements for some students being denied graduation. Senate Republicans said their counterparts were engaging in vote-swapping extortion.

Some six hours earlier, Gov. Jay Inslee had signed the operating budget, avoiding by a full 20 minutes a partial state government shutdown. Inslee and members of both parties from both chambers had hailed that budget as a good compromise that serves well the interests of the citizens.

Ordinarily, legislators would spend the day after a budget-signing extolling the wonders of that document. And for this particular budget, long debated and hard fought, they would have been talking about the historic nature of an agreement that spends an extra $1.3 billion on public schools to get the state out from under a contempt order from the Supreme Court; lowers tuition for all college students this fall, and drops it again for the four-year schools next year; the shores up a mental health and replaces some money bled out of safety net programs over the recession.

Instead, they were trying to explain how part of the deal came apart. Office of Financial Management Director David Schumacher said the just-signed budget might be technically illegal because it doesn’t balance, but practically speaking that wasn’t a problem if the Legislature fixes it in a few days or weeks.

"We were kind of surprised that we are in this position," Schumacher, who is Inslee's budget direction, said.

Legislative leaders were trying to figure out a solution and decide when to call their members back —probably sometime after the July 4th weekend. House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, was clearly more anxious to talk about what he called the positive investments in the budget and reluctant to wade into a interparty fight in the Senate. The House passed the bill on Monday with a supermajority by building relationships between the two parties, he said. But how each chamber would get those votes “was left to further negotiations,” Chopp said, and he couldn’t comment on what agreements might have existed in the Senate.

The fight in the Senate was over something that’s not a significant part of the budget — an effort to ease current requirements for high school students to pass certain assessment tests to graduate — but it stopped something that’s a very big part of the budget — a bill to suspend for four years the 2014 ballot measure to reduce the number of students in classrooms for all grades.

Voters passed Initiative 1351, but legislators and Inslee said it was too expensive to do on the timetable in the ballot measure and wanted to delay much of it for students in fourth through 12th grades for four years. No budget proposal from Inslee or in either chamber called for full funding of I-1351, and when a compromised was reached last weekend, class reductions were limited to kindergarten through third grade, a change that would save $2 billion in the effort to make the budget balance.

But to save that money, the Legislature had to change the initiative with a two-thirds majority.

Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, said legislators had a deal that members of both parties would supply the needed votes, because neither side has that super-majority. That’s what happened in the House on Monday, he said.

“This was a very serious breach of trust from the minority in passing a critical piece of the budget,” Schoesler said.

Sen. Andy Billig, D-Spokane, said Democratic leaders in that chamber always made clear that this was a tough request for some members who supported the initiative and came from districts that passed it with strong margins. On Tuesday, two Republican senators who would have voted yes were absent, so the number of needed Democratic yes votes went up by two to cover them.

Democrats said they could only get more members to agree to suspend part of I-1351 if Republicans would agree to pass a bill allowing high school seniors who failed a controversial biology assessment test to receive their diplomas. If the Senate was going to do something negative for students by not reducing crowded classrooms, Billig said, it should do something positive for at least a few of them unable to graduate because of the assessment test.

Senate Democrats had tried, and failed, to add a provision on the assessment test problems to the budget before it passed Monday. Republican leaders promised to take up the issue next year.

On Tuesday when Democrats said their extra votes would be contingent on passing a bill from the House on test assessments, Republicans refused. After the transportation tax bill passed the House about 2 a.m. Wednesday, it was stuck for several hours while the two parties tried, but failed, to find a compromise. After the Senate again approved the transportation taxes about 5:15 a.m., it took up the proposed changes to I-1351, and the bill eventually got a 27-17 vote, with three minority Democrats voting yes and two Republicans voting no. That which was short of the 33 needed for the supermajority, so it failed.

Legislators were sent home to their beds or breakfast, and told they’d be contacted when leaders would call them back to vote on a few remaining bills. That probably won’t be before next week, Schoesler said.

“It will be when the greatest number of members can be here,” Chopp said. “It’s just a question of picking the right time.”



The Spokesman-Review's political team keeps a critical eye on local, state and national politics.