The Budget

During a special session, the Legislature recently approved an early action budget package worth nearly half a billion dollars, closing about a quarter of the state’s budget gap.

This substantial down payment puts the Legislature well ahead in its work as it prepares to meet in regular session in January. In that session, we must face the toughest decisions – those that will determine the availability of health care services to seniors, the college opportunities open to our students and the quality of our kids’ educational experience.

The governor called the special session of the Legislature on Nov. 28 to address a roughly $1.4 billion shortfall in the state budget.

This is the latest round in an on-going struggle to address two pressures facing Washington – increasing need for services in a difficult economy, and a sharply diminished ability to pay for those services due to slow economic growth.

Since 2008, we’ve reduced state services by more than $10 billion. Where we could, we’ve made programs more efficient and reduced expenses, such as closing the last island prison in the United States in favor of less expensive facilities, and consolidating the functions of five administrative agencies, like printing and personnel, into a single department.

But the depth and reach of the Great Depression means we had to go beyond doing more with less. Today we are simply doing less. We’ve increased K12 school class sizes, and asked our teachers to take on more kids. At the same time, we cut pay for our teachers and everyone else in our K12 schools.

We cut support to our colleges and universities, and as a result, the tuition at our four-year schools has grown four times faster than personal income, and six times faster than inflation.
We eliminated health insurance coverage for two-thirds of the low-income working people using the Basic Health Plan.

These difficult steps and many others helped us balance the budget in May, setting aside more than $700 million in reserves.

However, the world economy has continued to struggle and that has impacted Washington’s recovery. Since June, the state Economic and Revenue Forecast Council has lowered expectations for state revenue by more than $2 billion during the current 2011-2013 budget, creating the current $1.4 billion shortfall.

In November, the governor proposed a budget including $2 billion in spending cuts, reductions to local government revenue sharing and fund transfers to leave a $600 million reserve. She also proposed buying back some services in education, public safety and health care through a temporary sales tax increase.