By The Herald Editorial Board
For most of us, news stories on government budgets rarely get our attention; unless the details involve a significant tax increase or loss of programs or services we see as important. (Or Congress is facing yet another government shutdown before kicking the can down the road once again.)
With all the policy work that comes out of government, issues of government revenue and spending — the basics of a budget — are especially important to our daily lives, determining how and how much we are taxed and the level of services government provides ourselves and our communities, including schools, roads, transit, law enforcement, courts and far more.
At the state level, were talking about a two-year operations budget that currently is spending about $70 billion for the basics of state services, along with a transportation budget that now stands at nearly $15 billion and a capital budget — for public buildings, housing, parks and other infrastructure — of about $10 billion.
As the late U.S. Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, R-Ill. — a contemporary of Washington’s Sens. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson — famously said: “A billion here and a billion there, and by and by, it begins to mount up into money.”
As crucial as these discussions are, however, it can be a struggle to keep our eyes from glazing over when the spreadsheets come out and the pluses, minuses and percentages get tossed around.
But there’s no better time than now, says a former state House representative, when lawmakers and officials — having started preparing the next two-year budget and are warning of a looming “budget crisis” — for state residents to drive into those numbers and the costs, benefits and trade-offs and better understand what’s going on.
Paul Graves, a former Republican state lawmaker and attorney, admits the state’s budgets are hard to figure out and hard to track when the goal is to be an informed citizen and provide your perspective to the lawmakers writing and adopting those budgets.
Graves, who represented the 5th Legislative District in east King County from 2017 to 2019, also is president of Enterprise Washington, a nonpartisan business and public advocacy nonprofit. The nonprofit recently launched a website — BudgetBreakdown.org — that looks to provide background, resources and encouragement in participating in the state’s budget process.
“Our goal is really to help people easily understand the state budget, how big it is, how much taxes we’re raising, and how much we’re spending and projected to spend over the next couple of years,” he said.
What the website offers are some animated short videos that explain the basics of the budget, how the state’s budget affects residents’ and businesses’ own budgets, and explanations of the budget process, with direct links to current budget documents, information from the state Office of Financial Management, economic forecasts and the proposed budget from former Gov. Jay Inslee and Gov. Bob Ferguson’s budget priorities for this year’s discussions.
The website, Graves said, tries to “put it in a way that is understandable and straightforward and really well-sourced, so that people don’t have to take our words for it. But they can go and look at the documents themselves.”
The videos and links also provide an objective view of the “budget crisis” that lawmakers are tackling.
That current crisis, as explained in media reports, is a $12 billion gap between estimated spending levels and projected revenues over the next four years, leading to Ferguson’s call at the end of last year for agencies to prepare across-the-board cuts of 6 percent to their budgets, among other potential cuts, as well as talk among some Democrats of seeking revenue from new taxes and push-back from Republicans to those proposals.
Yet, the curious thing about the current crisis, Graves said, is that the state’s problem is not an economic one. The revenue coming into state coffers, he said, is up 25 percent over the last four years, and the state’s economy remains one of the strongest in the nation.
The problem he, and some of the videos on the website explain, is that spending — which tracked the pace of revenue increases for much of the last decade, following the 2008 Great Recession — has more recently started to outpace that increase in revenue.
Money is still coming in. The state is expected to collect more than $10 billion in additional revenue over the next four years than it does now, but spending — if continued at current levels — would increase by $12 billion. And unlike the federal government, the state government — as it is for city and county governments — can’t fall back on deficit spending.
“It can be really hard to figure out how we got to this place right now when we have a strong, healthy economy and strong tax revenues,” Graves said.
That projected gap is what lawmakers now are focused on in looking at potential cuts and new revenue.
This is where the importance of an educated public comes in, Graves said.
“To give people real context for it, how it affects their daily lives and the cost of living around here, well, that really matters,” he said. “And so, whatever decisions that people want to make or policymakers want to make, we thought that it would be good to do this in the context of a well-educated public.”
As a former lawmaker, Graves said legislators do rely on the guidance that their constituents provide, whether that’s through emails, phone calls or testimony during hearings, which now allow for remote participation for those who can’t make the trip to Olympia.
“You get a real sense for what your community thinks about it,” he said, whether it regards policy, spending or taxes he said.
At the moment, lawmakers, a month into a 105-day session, are concentrating on policy issues, including new laws and programs, but soon will turn attention to budget concerns.
Now, Graves said, would be a good time for state residents to start diving into budget basics, gathering information, evaluating positions and preparing to provide comment and perspective to lawmakers.
That preparation is important.
“So much of what happens in the budget is pretty fast-paced,” Graves said. “And having a context for where we are, what we’re looking at, what the revenues are projected to look like, and what spending is projected to look like, it’s helpful to have all that already figured out by the time they start making real decisions.”
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