It’s Overtime In Olympia - Again Lawmakers Fail To Wrap Up Business; Lowry Calls For Special Session

As usual, state lawmakers failed to meet their own deadline as the legislative session drew to a close Sunday night, and declared the need for a special session to complete their work.

Gov. Mike Lowry called lawmakers into special session beginning today to write the 1995-‘97 budget and pass other bills necessary to implement it.

Lawmakers almost never finish their work on time and instead stay overtime in Olympia, at a cost to taxpayers of about $20,000 a day, including $66 a day in expenses for every lawmaker, including those who live in or near Olympia.

The biggest battles lie ahead, including resolution of a more than $600 million difference in spending between House and Senate versions of the state budget, and an equally wide ideological divide on tax cuts.

Lawmakers also must deal with more than a dozen GOP budget hardliners in the House who have cheerfully promised to shut down state government rather than compromise on the $17.3 billion House budget plan.

State government goes broke July 1 unless a budget bill is passed.

Some House leaders were confident last night of working out a deal. “We’ll be here a month at the most,” said Rep. Todd Mielke, R-Spokane, chairman of the House Republican Caucus.

Others made no predictions when lawmakers would reach agreement. “I would be totally, absolutely guessing … I pray about it every day,” said House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee.

Senate Democrats, who dedicated themselves to blunting the House GOP’s agenda this session, have learned by now not to count the GOP out.

Sitting in his ornate, velvet-curtained capitol office last night, Ballard looked tired but pleased as he munched a chocolate chip cookie and took stock of the session.

The House forced the Senate to open conference committee meetings for the first time in state history, and passed every one of the bills promised in the GOP Contract with Washington.

“Early on everyone made a joke about it, but we accomplished the major parts of our agenda,” Ballard said.

Mielke said he was surprised at the extent of the GOP’s success. “I thought it would be a two-year effort at least,” he said of the Contract.

“But the fact is we have some philosophical overlap with some of the Democrats in the Senate, and that made the difference.

“Otherwise we would have been locked out for two years.”

Dismissed as radical, out-of-touch, inexperienced, and inept by some Democrats, the House GOP instead showed it could stick together and even roll over the one-vote Democratic majority in the Senate to get its way.

Some major GOP victories of the session had been counted out as impossible, including a virtual repeal of the 1993 health care reform act, and passage of I-164, a property rights initiative.

House Republicans showed Gov. Mike Lowry at the beginning of the session they had the votes to completely repeal the health care act and the commission created to implement it.

In the end Lowry worked with House Republicans to craft a compromise that the Senate could swallow.

Republicans even convinced Senate Democrats to vote against their leadership to bring I-164 to the floor, using a rare procedural move some Democrats still are smarting over.

House Republicans also showed they knew how to compromise to get at least some of what they wanted. And they earned Democratic votes on many of their contract bills, most of which passed with at least some bipartisan support.

The Senate and mainstream Republicans moderated some of the House GOP’s most extreme proposals, which didn’t get beyond the talking stages, at least this year.

GOP ideas that raised eyebrows included measures to end affirmative action programs; privatize higher education, and several bills to funnel public tax dollars to private schools and home schoolers.

Many argued that for the public, the GOP’s true test will be the budget.

The House budget is generous with tax breaks for business, but skimpy on spending for education compared with the Senate plan. The House would cut K-12 education $126 million; hike higher education tuition rates and provide no additional financial aid.

“If your yardstick is the Contract, I think the public will say, yes, they really got something out of the House,” said Rep. Lisa Brown, D-Spokane.

“But if you are looking at pocketbook criteria, you are talking about higher tuition, maybe higher health care costs, and decreasing taxes for big business.”

But the GOP did well this session, some argued, because Republicans were tuned into the public’s wave length.

“They set not only the agenda, but the terms of debate,” said Sen. James West, R-Spokane. “They were tuned into the public’s pulse to reduce the size of government. They are on the right track, and have changed the course of the state for years to come.