Making sense of a state budget is complicated enough. It doesn’t help when different branches of government do their calculations in different formats.

Consider the “near general fund – state” (as distinguished from the more familiar “general fund – state”). The Legislature uses the former term, the governor’s budget office the latter.

Is that important? The governor’s office says no, but the Washington Research Council says yes. We side with the Research Council.

The Washington Research Council, a business-oriented think tank with a reputation for honest economic analysis, doesn’t think Gov. Chris Gregoire’s budget proposals can be covered for long by existing sources of revenue.

It would be nice if Washington citizens could study tidy columns of comparable numbers and do their own math, but it’s not that simple. That brings us back to the near general fund – state. (From here on, we’ll do things the government way and call it the NGFS.)

The NGFS was contrived by the Legislature three years ago in an attempt to lump the general fund – state (henceforth GFS) with several separate accounts that had been set up to fund specific programs with dedicated revenues.

The separate accounts in question largely arose after the passage in 1993 of Initiative 601, which limited the growth of the GFS. The programs addressed by the separate accounts would reasonably be found in a general fund. By breaking them out and funding them from dedicated revenue sources, however, lawmakers could escape the spending limits that applied only to the GFS.

This kind of mischief adds to the complexity of state budgeting and detracts from the people’s ability to keep an eye on their tax dollars. The Legislature mitigated the situation slightly in 2005 by extending the spending limits to those funds; that’s how they came up with the NGFS.

In a policy brief issued this month, the Washington Research Council noted that if the separate accounts run short, they can be replenished by the GFS. For that matter, any surpluses can be routed to the GFS.

Restoring those activities to the general fund would make the most sense, but at least the Legislature’s NGFS attempts to give a fuller picture of whether the dedicated revenues are sufficient.

The Washington Research Council is convinced they are not, saying earlier infusions of funds from the GFS create a misleading picture of fund health, and when the revenues run short and have to be made up, it will create demands that the GFS can’t meet.

Meanwhile, a promising budgeting approach adopted under former Gov. Gary Locke is being compromised. Under that method, state budget writers began by calculating how much the state had to spend, then set priorities and allocated what was available, stopping when the money was gone. The existence of dedicated funds – within the Legislature’s NGFS but outside the governor’s GFS – erodes fiscal discipline while leaving citizens ITD.

In The Dark.