Senator proposes state worker salary cut

By David Ammons

Associated Press

OLYMPIA — A senior Senate Democrat, hoping to head off deep state budget cuts and layoffs, on Tuesday proposed a 5 percent salary cut for all state employees for one year.

"We’ve got to get innovative, really think outside the box during times like these," Sen. Darlene Fairley, D-Lake Forest Park, said in an interview. "If people out in the rest of the world are having to tighten their belts, why shouldn’t we be a part of that?"

Her proposal is that all public employees, including the governor and legislators, state agency workers, higher education employees and teachers, agree to a 5 percent pay cut in the upcoming fiscal year, which begins next summer.

She hasn’t run the numbers, but believes the savings might be enough to head off major budget cuts, including employee layoffs.

The Senate Ways and Means Committee estimated that if lawmakers canceled a scheduled pay raise for state employees and higher education professors and staffers and cut their pay 5 percent, it would save $140 million. There are about 90,000 public employees, not counting teachers.

Teacher salaries are negotiated at the local level and probably could not be cut, particularly following voter approval of Initiative 732 last year mandating annual cost-of-living increases, the committee staff said.

Gov. Gary Locke’s budget director, Marty Brown, said he’s discussed Fairley’s plan with her. "We did look into it, but it’s not something we’re looking at right now" as the administration puts a new budget together.

Fairley, a senior member of the budget-writing committee and chairwoman of the construction budget panel, said the state faces a temporary revenue problem and that it makes more sense to cut salaries than to reduce frontline services that people need in a recession. If everyone takes a pay cut, it should save some of their fellow workers’ jobs, she said.

"At a time when Boeing is laying off, state government shouldn’t be laying off, too, or you start really spiraling down the economy," she said.

Fairley said she got the idea for the pay cut from her son, whose company, Fortee software in Kirkland, cut salaries by 15 percent to save jobs.

Greg Devereux, head of the Washington Federation of State Employees, AFL-CIO, praised Fairley for trying to head off layoffs and service cuts, but said the union can’t agree to pay cuts.

"There are many other ideas we ought to look at before we talk about such things," he said in an interview. Those include using state reserves of about $450 million and repealing some of the $1.2 billion worth of tax cuts granted in the past decade, he said.

Massive layoffs to solve a temporary financial problem would end up costing plenty in retraining and recruitment costs, Devereux said.

Earlier in the day, Brown said in a prepared statement about budget woes that "state-funded employees may see some changes in compensation or benefits packages, but no one’s made any decisions about that yet."

In an interview, Brown said that statement was simply a warning that "We don’t want to take anything off the table right now."