The Legislature’s 60-day sessions, which alternate with the longer biannual budget sessions, are where low expectations spend the winter.
To reprise: The Legislature remains under a state Supreme Court contempt order and is being fined $100,000 a day for having failed to provide the court an adequate plan as to how it will meet its constitutional mandate to amply fund K-12 education and remove a significant portion of the burden from local school levies to provide basic education, namely teacher salaries and benefits.
The highest hope for the coming session is that lawmakers can agree to a basic framework of a plan that can be refined and adopted during the budget session in 2017.
But some short-term fixes must be addressed this session if the state hopes to avoid making the education funding problem and other funding crises even more difficult to address.
A supplemental budget proposal by Gov. Jay Inslee offers a couple of patches that offer a starting point for discussion when the session begins Jan. 11. Inslee’s supplemental proposal address three major needs:
$178 million to pay for fighting this summer’s record wildfire season;
$137 million to address the state’s other crisis regarding mental health treatment; and
$100 million to increase the state’s share of starting teachers’ pay by about $5,000, an expenditure the governor would shift to the next fiscal year.
Inslee has proposed paying for the bump in starting pay by ending certain tax exemptions for oil refineries, real estate excise taxes paid by banks and the tax on bottled water and by requiring residents from states without a sales tax to apply for a sales tax refund for items bought in Washington state rather than being provided the refund automatically.
Sen. Andy Hill, R-Redmond, the Senate Republican’s chief budget writer, criticized the governor’s proposal as a spending plan that “fails to provide a sustainable way to pay for it.”
Whether Inslee’s proposals for paying for the additional spending are sustainable or not, the need remains.
Without quickly adding desperately needed health care staff to the state’s mental health system, the state risks further state and federal court orders and the increasing potential for costly lawsuits.
The proposal to increase starting teacher pay acknowledges the responsibility that the state has for reducing reliance on local school levies for a significant portion of teacher pay. It also should help address an alarming teacher shortage in the state.
A survey released in November by the University of Washington College of Education found that 80 percent of the state’s school principals reported having to hire under-qualified teachers; 61 percent of principals of urban schools still had positions that were unfilled as of mid-October; and 54 percent reported not being able to find enough substitute teachers on most days.
The supplemental spending that Inslee outlined offers temporary patches for the problems, but it allows more time for the Legislature to find a more permanent fix for the larger issues.
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