OLYMPIA — Top Republican and Democratic lawmakers agree: The looming state budget deficit will dominate the upcoming legislative session, and the hole could get worse.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has proposed a cut-heavy budget that also counts on about $1 billion in federal assistance. But some lawmakers aren’t thrilled with that calculation.
“We can’t balance the budget on hope,” said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. “We need to see dollars.”
The 105-day session convenes Jan. 12. They will grapple with major spending cuts as the state tries to solve a projected budget deficit of about $5.7 billion.
Senate Republican budget chief Joe Zarelli of Ridgefield said he expects the deficit to climb as high as $7 billion after the next revenue forecast in March.
“The sooner we realize where we’re at, we can start moving forward,” he said at a meeting with reporters Tuesday in Olympia to discuss the upcoming session.
Last month, Gregoire stuck to her campaign pledge and unveiled a no-new-taxes budget plan that would severely cut spending, suspend voter initiatives, transfer and borrow money and rely on a federal bailout.
Under Gregoire’s plan, spending cuts totaling more than $3 billion during the next 2 1/2 years would be felt across state government, including K-12 and higher education, social services, prisons, health programs, state parks and pay raises.
“Some of the cuts in the governor’s budget I think we feel are not wise, given their impact on families,” Brown said.
But she said majority Democrats are reviewing the proposed cuts before considering alternative solutions, like taxes.
Brown said that while more taxes can’t be ruled out, “it’s not where we start.”
“It’s not just a question of a tax or a cut, they can both be very damaging,” she said.
House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, agreed, saying that it was important to look at the budget not only as a financial document, “but a moral document as well.”
Sending proposed taxes to the public for approval may be the only option available for raising new money. Voter initiatives require a difficult two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Legislature to raise taxes, but the hurdle is removed if lawmakers put taxes on the ballot. That also applies to shrinking any tax exemptions.
House Minority Leader Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, said that he’s worried that “we’re going to take the hardest cuts and send them to the voters as taxes.”
“We’re going to go ahead and cut education and say to the voters, ‘Here, we’ve got to get new taxes to pay for these programs,”’ he said. “That’s not the kind of solutions we want to look at. We want to look at the budget as a whole.”
Marty Brown, Gregoire’s legislative director, said the deficit’s size will erase some turf battles that might otherwise occur in the budget negotiations.
In years past, he said, the governor’s staff vigorously defended the governor’s budget proposal during legislative hearings. But this year, the executive branch will be much more open to changes by the Legislature, he said.
“If somebody’s got a better idea, we’re open to it. If a priority that we did not fund is deemed a higher priority than something else, then we’re open to that discussion,” Brown said.
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