SEATAC — Gov. Jay Inslee met with legislative leaders and Attorney General Bob Ferguson on Monday to discuss how to address the Supreme Court sanctions announced last week over education funding.
They gathered in a private meeting at SeaTac City Hall to discuss the latest development in the McCleary education funding lawsuit.
“It’s important for all of them to sit around a table and talk,” said Inslee’s spokesman, David Postman. Postman said the governor would talk with reporters after the meeting was set to end late afternoon. But he stressed that there was not likely any pending announcement on the governor calling lawmakers back into a special session.
“Special session is not a strategy, it’s a tool,” he said. “You’re not going to call a special session in the hopes that forces action.”
On Thursday, a unanimous court said the state would be sanctioned $100,000 a day until the state comes into compliance with the court’s requirement for a full plan on education funding. The money will be put into a dedicated education account, and Postman said that part of Monday’s discussion would be on how best to comply with that. He noted that only the Legislature has the authority to create a special account, as dictated by the court.
“We cannot write a check to an account that doesn’t exist today,” Postman said, saying that they will just keep count of the fine and that when the Legislature does return to session, they’ll have to create the account and decide where the money comes from.
“In the big picture, whether it sits in an account since last Thursday or is held on the books, we are losing $100,000 a day,” he said.
Last week’s ruling was the latest development in a long-running impasse between lawmakers and the justices, who in 2012 ruled that the state is failing to meet its constitutional duty to pay for the cost of basic education for its 1 million schoolchildren. The lawsuit against the state was brought by a coalition of school districts, parents, teachers and education groups. It’s known as the McCleary case for the family named in the lawsuit.
In its original ruling, and repeated in later follow-up rulings, the justices have told the Legislature to find a way to pay for the reforms and programs they had already adopted, including all-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes, student transportation and classroom supplies, and to fix the state’s overreliance on local tax levies to pay for education.
If Inslee and the Legislature choose to ignore the court’s order until the next scheduled legislative session begins Jan. 11, 2016, the state would end up paying about $15 million in sanctions — a small amount compared with the current two-year $38 billion state operating budget that includes more than $300 million in reserves that can be tapped by lawmakers. Budget staff is still working to determine how to handle the fine, including whether they need to wait until the Legislature is back in session in order to allocate the funds as directed by the court.
Earlier this year, the Legislature approved what it called a $1.3 billion down payment toward fully paying the cost of basic education, an amount critics said fell billions of dollars short.
While the court acknowledged that progress was made by lawmakers during this year’s triple overtime legislative session, it said the state failed to provide a plan for full compliance by the 2018 deadline.
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