Close call, and wake-up call
Published 3:41 pm Friday, August 6, 2010
State government appears to have dodged a mighty big bullet, now that the U.S. Senate has agreed to another round of emergency aid for Medicaid and schools. We hope a valuable lesson didn’t also whiz past state lawmakers’ heads.
Had Congress failed to approve the additional funding to states — Washington will get about $543 million if the House acts this week, as expected — Gov. Chris Gregoire would likely have been forced to make across-the-board cuts of 4 to 5 percent. That could have included as many as 3,000 public school teaching jobs, making classrooms more crowded for students across the state this fall.
The governor would have had no discretion over where to cut. Only the Legislature has such authority, and rudderless majority Democrats had said they couldn’t reach consensus on new spending priorities, so a special session would have been pointless.
The lesson for lawmakers, and the governor: That was too close a call. The effort launched by Gregoire to reset the priorities, size and efficiency of state government is essential to a stable future. It must succeed.
Gregoire told reporters last week that the last-minute votes in Congress “served as a wake-up call to the legislators and public at large that this (budget crisis) is real.”
If it didn’t, it’s hard to imagine what would.
And in this rocky recovery, even an infusion of $543 million doesn’t guarantee more cuts won’t be necessary. The U.S. Labor Department reported Friday that the economy lost more jobs than expected last month, just the latest sign that the recovery has stalled. No one will be surprised if next month’s state revenue forecast falls again.
The 2011-13 budget already starts with a projected $3 billion shortfall. The crisis is real, all right.
Besides meaningful downsizing of state government, the Legislature should also deliver new budget tools for the governor to use in future economic downturns. It’s absurd that Gregoire faced having to cut the same proportion from education as all other programs, and that state law wouldn’t have allowed her to leave an emergency reserve. The governor should have enough discretion to make rational decisions about what to cut, especially when the Legislature has shown itself incapable of doing so.
As revenues have plummeted the past two years, state lawmakers have used every budget gimmick they could to scrape by. This is likely the last bandage they’ll get from Congress. The next Legislature must be up to the new task at hand: setting priorities that align with new budget realities.
