Spin Control: The way budgets are done could be this budget’s undoing

Shortly after dawn Wednesday, as the state Senate descended into recriminations about who was reneging on their word and who was being mean to school kids, the chamber’s chief budget writer made an impassioned plea to stick with the deal because that is the way budgets are done. Perhaps truer words never were spoken.

“It’s not the way we do budgets around here,” Sen. Andy Hill, R-Redmond, said of some Senate Democrats’ refusal to pass a bill that was connected to a budget they’d already approved, and without which the spending plan would have a $2 billion hole. A deal with things people don’t like but must vote for anyway “is standard budget practice,” he said.

Up for debate was a bill to suspend a major portion of Initiative 1351, which passed in November and requires the state to reduce the number of students in classrooms. Almost from the moment ballots were counted, and certainly since legislators arrived in January, many have acknowledged that however popular the concept may be – and make no mistake, it is – the state’s budget couldn’t do all classes from kindergarten through high school on the schedule the initiative requires.

That assumption was so common that reporters regularly asked how lawmakers could craft a spending plan and accompanying legislation that rewrote I-1351 and get a two-thirds majority in a House controlled by Democrats and a Senate controlled by Republicans. The bar is so high that Senate Republicans proposed sending a new initiative to November’s ballot to repeal I-1351, which only required a simple majority, and write a budget as though it would pass.

Dumb move, said House and Senate Democrats. If voters decide to keep I-1351, the Legislature would be faced with a $2 billion hole when it returned in January.

When a budget agreement was finally announced June 27, the 163rd day of a session devoted largely to reaching that agreement, Gov. Jay Inslee held a news conference with legislative leaders and their budget writers to say they had a deal. “The hard compromises that had to be brokered … all of those have been made,” the governor said.

Among the inevitable questions was “what about 1351?” Inslee was as coy as a Southern debutante at her first cotillion in dodging this and almost every request for details: “We’ll have more to say about that in subsequent discussions.”

That discussion occurred as the sun was coming up Wednesday, after a full day and night of the Senate being in session. Republicans wanted to pass the bill that made changes to I-1351, and Democrats were refusing to come up with the nine votes needed to get to that two-thirds majority unless the Senate also voted for something they wanted but had been thwarted from getting all session. That was a bill to remove some testing requirements that many considered an unfair barrier to graduation for some good high school students.

That wasn’t part of the deal, Hill, other Republicans, and even a few Democrats said. Some of the Democrats who were balking at making changes to I-1351 had already voted for a budget that assumed those changes would be made.

Sen. Jim Hargrove of Hoquiam, the Democrats’ chief budget negotiator, tried to keep his members from jumping ship. He pulled a much-creased piece of paper from his pocket, which he said contained his caucus’s budget priorities that guided him in discussions, and explained changing the assessment tests isn’t on it.

Cutting back on I-1351 was part of the deal, countered Sen. Andy Billig, D-Spokane. Voting yes on that particular bill was not.

Several bills aren’t on the list legislators agreed to but are implicit in the deal, Hill said. “We know how this works. This isn’t everybody’s first rodeo.”

Therein lies the truth of the situation and the crux of the problem with the way the Legislature budgets. The two budget committees hold hearings on their initial proposals, which give lobbyists of all stripes a chance to sit in front of a panel and plead their case for a minute or two. But real negotiations are conducted in secret. It is the way budgets are done, and last week, possibly undone.

Had those negotiations been open, and had the strings attached to the deal been public, no question and probably no sunrise debate. And no need to come back this week to fix things.

On dawn patrol

Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, got lots of comments and raised a few eyebrows with a Facebook post Wednesday regarding the Senate debate on I-1351. He described the Democrats’ maneuver as “disgraceful” and said some of their members were inebriated on the floor.

That prompted one of his friends to ask why she hadn’t heard about it in the media. “It didn’t make the media because all the reporters went home at 1 o’clock in the morning thinking that the deals had been reached. The blowup happened at 3 AM,” he replied.

That brought some pushback from reporters, many of whom knew the deal was blowing up Tuesday afternoon and did not go home until the sun came up. In fact, when Manweller and his colleagues were debating the gas tax increase at 2:30 a.m., at least three reporters were sitting at the House press table in front of the chamber. Manweller is a college professor, so by definition he’s a smart guy. But he probably forgot the old adage that one should not argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton. In the 21st century, that extends to folks who use social media as part of their jobs.

There was a quick reaction from some bleary-eyed reporters suggesting he check their tweets. Manweller later said he was mistaken and apologized to the press corps.

As for Democratic senators being inebriated, we didn’t see anyone staggering around the Senate wings. The video of the debate, which we’re posting on the blog, suggests people were tired but not drunk.