Gop Budget Fails To Help Spokane

The Spokane area, well known for its contribution to last fall’s Republican tidal wave, now begins to see what good the big change will do us.

In the Washington state House of Representatives, the new majority has put together a budget for the next two years. In many respects it does live up to the voters’ mandate.

And yet, this draft Republican plan leaves the most urgent Spokane needs out in the cold, just as if West-Side Democrats were still in charge.

First, the good news.

The budget would improve Washington’s business climate, which drives employers to Post Falls, by rolling back the business & occupation tax and lifting the sales tax on job-creating industrial machinery.

And at last, the GOP ends Olympia’s homage to the state worker unions. It requires that state workers contribute to the cost of their health insurance, as private-sector employees must do. It consolidates some agencies, reducing overhead. It attacks bureaucracy in the previously underscrutinized K-12 education system. It requires that if teachers get pay raises for college credits, the classes taken be relevant to the teachers’ duties.

The GOP shifts overall state priorities away from welfare handouts, to the state’s undersized higher education system. The budget would add enrollment capacity, though in doing so it shortchanges Spokane.

Which leads to the bad news.

The Republicans failed to provide design money for the next building planned at the Spokane higher education park. This facility would house and expand degree programs in health sciences, careers that are so popular scores of qualified students are turned away. Yet the GOP funded not only design but construction, for branch campuses elsewhere. Spokane, long a leading innovator in higher education, deserves clearer state support for its proven, career-oriented graduate education programs.

The GOP also proposes to slash $126 million (and 900 teachers) from K-12 schools, as a penalty for student absence rates it thinks are too high. But teacher layoffs and bigger class sizes would inhibit teachers from noticing and preventing potential dropouts.

There’d be no need to chop the public’s schools if the GOP would abandon a property tax cut that mainly benefits big corporations, which receive enough goodies from the budget already. Nor would there be any need to cut well-regarded child abuse prevention programs in Spokane.

Certainly, the Republicans improved on the governor’s spending plan. But they haven’t yet earned the applause of education-supporting communities like ours.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board