OLYMPIA — State lawmakers are set to begin a special session Monday, the first of what could be multiple overtimes for them to write a new state budget that will satisfy a court decree on funding of public schools.
Gov. Jay Inslee announced the start date at a news conference Friday.
He scolded and blamed Senate Republicans for impeding progress by refusing to negotiate on matters in the two-year spending plan other than education funding.
“This morning Senate Republicans told my team they would negotiate on McCleary but they would not negotiate on the budget,” Inslee said. “You can’t do one without the other and insisting on this approach will only lengthen the process.”
Inslee said legislators “have a responsibility to negotiate” and the Democrat-controlled House has accepted that responsibility but the Republican-led Senate has not.
He expressed frustration that Republicans see “holding out” as a strategy and said he is “doing everything I can humanly imagine to do short of waterboarding to get these folks to negotiate but the Republicans have refused to date.
“This job cannot wait,” he said. “This is serious business.”
The lead Republican budget writer sharply disagreed with the governor’s perspective.
“Absolutely we’re working in good faith,” said Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. “We’re dead serious. We want to get this done.”
The problem, he said, is House Democrats are counting on billions of dollars in new tax revenue for their budget and the Senate plan does not. Until the House approves bills to raise the taxes, it’s unclear whether the taxes enjoy political support and thus are an actual sum of money on which the two sides can negotiate, he said.
“If you can find some way to take the taxes that don’t appear to have support off the table, I think that would get us right into negotiations,” he said.
This will be the fourth time in Inslee’s tenure legislators will need at least one special session to finish their work.
In the budget-writing years of 2013 and 2015, lawmakers didn’t reach agreements until late June, barely avoiding a partial shutdown of state government. The 2015 session spanned three overtimes and ended in July, setting a record for longevity at 176 days.
Thus far the House has passed a two-year, $44.9 billion spending plan that pours another $1.87 billion into public schools — the bulk for salaries of teachers, administrators and staff — to push the state closer to covering the full cost of basic education by next year, as required by the state Supreme Court.
It depends on $3 billion in new revenue from tax changes, including a new capital gains tax, higher business taxes, and revision of the real estate excise tax to make sellers of expensive properties pay more and cheaper properties pay less. And there is a renewed attempt to tax bottled water and end the sales tax exemption for out-of-state residents.
The Republican-led Senate, meanwhile, has passed a $43.3 billion budget proposal that puts an additional $1.8 billion into education in the next two-year cycle. It relies on a new statewide property tax earmarked for schools that would require the approval of voters in November.
Democratic leaders in the House say they’ve made repeated requests, in person and in writing, to their Republican counterparts in the Senate to begin serious negotiations. That would include face-to-face bargaining on spending levels and exchanges of written offers on provisions within the budget.
Senate Republicans have declined until two conditions are met. First, they say the House budget is incomplete until the majority party approves the tax package. Absent a vote, they consider the $3 billion to be “ghost dollars” and won’t negotiate a level of spending reliant on money they consider nonexistent.
Second, Republican senators want the two chambers to reach agreement on satisfying the Supreme Court school-funding mandate in the McCleary case. Eight lawmakers, two from each of the four caucuses, have been working on this since early March but are not within striking distance of a final deal. Whatever emerges will dictate decisions throughout the remainder of the state budget, Republicans say.
Democrats contend the demand for a vote on taxes is just posturing. They point out the Senate budget counts on a critical sum of dollars that voters must approve this fall, well after the start of the next budget cycle. If voters say no, it would create a big hole. Democrats say that shortcoming is not preventing them from starting negotiations.
“I am extremely frustrated and a bit angry like my constituents are that we didn’t get the people’s work done on time,” said Sen. Guy Palumbo, D-Maltby, who is in his first year. “I don’t believe compromise is a dirty word but you can’t compromise with someone who doesn’t negotiate with you.”
Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dospueblos.
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