No Wash. special legislative session

OLYMPIA — Gov. Chris Gregoire will not call a special legislative session for lawmakers to finish their last few bits of work on the state budget, officials said Thursday. The decision came after House and Senate leaders failed to agree on a limited agenda for a possible special session, which the governor wanted to last just one day. The Legislature’s majority Democrats downplayed the news, noting they had finished the vast majority of their work, particularly a $35 billion two-year budget that whacks about $4 billion from projected state spending. “All in all, we got a tremendous amount of the job accomplished,” said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. “I don’t think the electorate cares,” said House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam. “We got out of Dodge, and did what we had to do.” Gregoire said she was disappointed, mainly because lawmakers won’t be acting on a stalled plan to let school districts bump up their local property tax levies, seen as a way to soften teacher layoffs as the state cuts education spending. But overall, Gregoire said the 2009 Legislature performed well, making difficult choices to bridge the largest budget deficit in about 25 years. “I think they did a good job under the worst of circumstances,” she said. “Sure, they had a couple of things hanging at the end. But you know, nothing’s perfect.” Lawmakers had been pondering a special session since the early morning hours of April 27, when they exhausted the 105-day regular session without passing three bills tied to the 2009-2011 state budget. One of the bills would have saved the state about $60 million by trimming spending on “levy equalization,” a program that aids school districts whose local financing is limited by lower property values. It also would have raised the state lid on local schools’ property tax levy collections by 4 percentage points, with a ceiling of 35 percent of combined state and federal school spending. Another leftover bill would have saved about $8 million by deporting illegal immigrants from the prison system, and the third would have saved a small amount of money by indirectly shortening prison sentences. Those three bills were left unfinished in part because of a political logjam between the Senate and House in the session’s final days. Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, was pushing for a bill that would loosen some voter-approved mandates for more environmentally friendly electric generation. But House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, couldn’t get it through the House after Pierce and Clark county lawmakers demanded more leeway for their hometown utilities. Gregoire, who declared earlier this week that time was running out, had hoped lawmakers would limit themselves to the three budget-related bills in any special session. She also was interested in rolling back the levy equalization cut. But Brown was adamant that the clean-energy changes be resurrected, even though they already had sucked up many hours in the House and had no realistic chance of getting approved in that chamber without major changes. House leaders, who had always sounded lukewarm about the need for a special session, were talking mostly about moving the three budget bills without changes. In the end, there was no deal. Failing to pass the final bills means the state’s reserves will drop to about $755 million, but officials hope declining state revenue collections will not sap all of that money. If revenue does plummet further, Gregoire still could be forced to call a special session. The governor has limited across-the-board authority to cut spending, and legislators did not give her a hoped-for backup plan authorizing more targeted options for further spending cuts. Republicans praised Gregoire’s decision, saying it preserves levy equalization money and stops the state from spending the thousands of dollars per day needed to run the Legislature. “It was a great decision,” said Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla. “As I said last week, there is simply no reason for the Legislature to come back to consider measures that will cost taxpayers even more money.”