Budget Meetings May Be Out In Open

Senate Democrats passed an $18 billion state budget Friday that sets the stage for weeks of negotiations in conference committee with the House.

And for the first time, those meetings may be open to the public.

Conference committees are made up of six members, with three appointed from each house. They hammer out a compromise version of legislation, which must be voted up or down without amendment by the full House and Senate.

The House has called for open conference committee meetings. And Sen. Nita Rinehart, D-Seattle, chairwoman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, said Friday she too would be amenable to open sessions of the conference committee to be appointed next week on the budget.

There is virtually no important area of the budget on which the House and Senate agree, however. For starters, they are more than $600 million apart in how much the state should spend overall in the next two years.

The House’s smaller budget offers tax cuts for business, while the Senate would spend more on K-12 and higher education.

Other key differences include:

The Senate would provide an across-the-board 5 percent raise for teachers, college professors and staff, and state employees. The House budget provides $100 a month raises to some state employees, but not all.

The House would require state employees to pay $32 a month toward their health benefits. The Senate included no such provision.

The Senate budget also is more generous to K-12 and higher education programs than the House version, spending $457 million more than the House altogether, including $27 million in additional financial aid for higher education and 3,720 more enrollment slots. The Senate also provided $119 million for four planning days for K-12 instructional staff to improve student success, as well as readiness-to-learn programs that include meals for low-income kids.

The House didn’t fund education reform, and cut the K-12 budget by $126 million by tying the amount of money allotted to school districts to student attendance.

Local Spokane social service programs fare badly in both budgets, something some Spokane lawmakers say they hope to fix in conference committee negotiations.

Local programs that would get no state money under either budget include the Deaconess Regional Center for Child Abuse and Neglect; family counseling services in School District 81 estimated to help 7,000 kids a year; a parent outreach program at the Martin Luther King Center; and a home for unwed teenage mothers run by Volunteers of America.

The Senate budget goes even further: it also cuts $100,000 provided in the House budget for the Volunteers of America Crosswalk program in Spokane.

“We shouldn’t just drop them. We should come up with some kind of transitional funding,” said Sen. Jim West, R-Spokane, ranking minority member of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Most Senate Republicans voted against the budget plan.

“This is just ho-hum, plain old vanilla budget,” West said. “I’d have to characterize it as very boring. Status quo, business as usual.”

West and other GOP members also criticized the budget because it spends right up to the limit allowed by Initiative 601, the tax and spending limitation measure.

But Senate Republicans made no effort to amend the budget on the floor, choosing instead to wait for changes to be made in conference committee. The budget passed on a vote of 28-19.

Sen. Eugene Prince, R-Thornton, voted for it, citing the budget’s support for higher education. Senators John Moyer and Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane, were excused, due to illness. Senators West and Bob Morton, R-Orient voted against it.