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December 9, 2011 in City
State budget deal elusive
Governor: Lawmakers likely won’t trim enough but have jump-start for January
OLYMPIA – Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire acknowledged legislators are unlikely to pass some $2 billion in budget cuts she proposed in this special session. The governor also sees no chance they’ll ask voters to approve a temporary half-cent sales tax increase in March.
In a conversation with reporters after a Senate hearing Thursday afternoon, Gregoire said she now believes that whatever budget changes legislators can pass in the special session, it won’t be “a full meal deal.”
She said she would consider “a significant down payment” acceptable, but declined to describe a level of cuts that she would regard as a success.
The special session will still be valuable, she said, because legislators will have a head start on budget discussions when the regular session begins on Jan. 9. She predicted it will allow the Legislature to pass the earliest supplemental budget in history next year.
Since the special session began, some Republicans have called for government reform in conjunction with cuts and before any new taxes. Some Democrats have called for a better balance between program cuts and new taxes.
“Everybody’s got their slogan,” she said. “At some point we need to get past the rhetoric and get to work.”
Gregoire called legislators into a special session on Nov. 28 after unveiling a plan to cut about $2 billion in programs and salaries to close a looming gap in the budget. She also asked them to ask voters to “buy back” about $500 million of those cuts through a statewide ballot measure next March on a temporary sales tax increase.
More than a third of the way into the special session, visible progress on the budget is hard to find. Many legislators who are not in leadership or members of the budget-writing Ways and Means committees have returned to their homes, and the two chambers hold “pro forma” sessions most days.
House and Senate leaders, and the chairmen of the budget committees, have been involved in closed-door discussions among themselves and with Gregoire. The budget committees, meanwhile, have held a series of hearings in which people who rely on state programs described the possible effects of those programs being eliminated.
Until legislators settle on an “all-cuts” budget and see the effect those cuts have on state programs, Gregoire said, they won’t be ready to ask voters to approve a tax increase. She’s proposing a three-year, half-cent jump in the sales tax, with money dedicated to certain public school, college, health care and public safety programs that will be cut from the budget if that tax isn’t approved.
That won’t happen by the end of the special session, she said, so the state will miss the Dec. 31 deadline for proposing a ballot measure for a March election.
“Every month that goes by that they don’t have a budget, we have a bigger hole,” she said.
Romney/Paul split weighing on county GOP 
DickAdams on December 09 at 7:22 a.m.
Gregoire, for gosh sake, has spewed rhetoric for months and has the audacity to puke out, they get past it and get to work. And then has the a mitigated gull to say, we have a bigger hole. For crying out loud, Gregoire dug the hole with her reckless spending habits in the first place and the idiots in the legislature betrayed the taxpayers taking her up on her suggestions by enacting laws to spend the taxpayers money. The legislators apparently gave her anything she asked for.
I copied parts of the story below.
(“Everybody’s got their slogan,” she said. “At some point we need to get past the rhetoric and get to work.” “Every month that goes by that they don’t have a budget, we have a bigger hole,” she said.)
D Statler on December 09 at 7:49 a.m.
Sure glad we the taxpayers are here and ready to stuff tax dollars into the holes in the state’s sinking budget. It was pretty obvious that the budget wasn’t solvent when the legislators came home last time. Lets hope that these cuts start at the top. I read that the Parks department is already cutting workers before administration. Lets hope this is not a indication of future trends in leadership of our State Government.
RedCedar on December 09 at 10:23 a.m.
Several random observations:
Washington is a frustrating state to be governor of, because the governor doesn’t have much power.
Washington has a history of copying California, and now that seems to include being in a perpetual unresolved budget “crisis”, under which nothing terrible happens and life goes on just fine.
The overall state budget continues to grow each year.
When actual cuts are made in some small area, they are cuts in the number of low-level employees and in services actually provided, rather than in administrative overhead.
The economy of the Seattle area is so strong and diverse that it can probably carry the bloated state bureaucracy and its accumulation of “nice to have” programs until the recession is over, so that the state will never be forced to seriously re-evaluate its spending priorities.
This special session was a complete and total waste of time and money.