OLYMPIA — Democratic and Republican lawmakers said Wednesday that they have reached an agreement on a package that patches more than half of an estimated $550 million deficit in this year’s state budget.
The agreement trims several state programs, including the state’s health care program f
or the poor and aid for the disabled, as well as transfer funds from other programs. In total, the plan cuts the deficit by about $370 million, with $242 million in cuts and $125 million in transfers.
“Many of the decisions found in this budget agreement are extremely painful ones. They aren’t necessarily the decisions we’d embrace if we had a wider set of options before us, but that’s a luxury we don’t have,” said Sen. Ed Murray, D-Seattle, chairman of the Senate’s Ways and Means committee. “Our obligation is to bring the current budget into balance, and we intend to meet our obligation.”
A vote is expected Friday on the package. Lawmakers still have to close about $180 million to finally balance the books on this year’s budget.
Lawmakers have spent more than a month of the 105-day legislative session trying to come up with this agreement, and once this package is approved, Gov. Chris Gregoire and legislators will have to tackle an estimated $5 billion deficit in the next two-year budget, which is roughly $37 billion.
The Senate GOP’s budget negotiator, Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, said the agreement moves the Legislature closer to “reforming three large, visible state-only entitlements, which is important because reforms need to have a prominent role in the development of the next biennial budget.”
The agreements include maintaining cash grants to the Disability Lifeline program, but reducing them by 50 percent and moving to eliminating the cash grant in the next two-year budget; limiting enrollment of children to the state’s Children’s Health Program to families at 200 percent of the federal poverty level; and limiting eligibility to the Basic Health Plan to those who qualify for Medicaid, essentially filtering out illegal immigrants who may be on the plan.
The agreement came from negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate.
House Republican leaders, though, said their members, who are the minority, would not vote in favor of this package, pointing to education funding, in which $25 million were taken from class size reduction initiatives. They said they would have preferred eliminating the cash grants for Disability Lifeline, which provides cash and medical care to unemployable disabled adults who aren’t covered by federal social security benefits.
Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, said that the $25 million were cut from class sizes because there could more dips in revenue projections.
“I don’t have another set of cuts we can take instead,” Hunter said.
Rep. Gary Alexander, R-Olympia, said that one of the reasons he didn’t like the package deal was because it didn’t close enough of the deficit.
“We’re going to have to address that,” he said. “We’ve left a lot of issues on the table.”
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