Lawmaker gets short break and heads back

Enterprise staff

For 44th District Rep. Hans Dunshee, there isn’t going to be much of a break between the April 27 end of the Legislature’s regular get-together and the May 12 start of a special session.

The Democratic chair of the House Capital Budget Committee was fixing his gutters and mowing the lawn on Tuesday before heading back down to Olympia to start negotiations on the main piece of unfinished business, the state’s operating budget.

“We can finish up the capital budget fairly quickly,” Dunshee said. “But we’ll have to wait for the operating budget.”

Ordinarily, the capital budget, which pays for things such as school buildings, can move ahead separately from the larger operating budget. But, Dunshee said, this is no ordinary budget year.

Lawmakers are struggling to find ways to accommodate a $2.6 billion revenue drop off. The Republican-controlled Senate passed a no-taxes plan but the Democratic House was unable to come up with a compromise before the Sunday midnight deadline.

On other items, Dunshee said he wasn’t happy with the 5-cent-a-gallon gas tax included in the transportation bill that did pass and awaits Gov. Gary Locke’s signature.

“You have to come to a compromise at some point,” he said. “3-4 cents staggered over time would been better and may have avoided a possible repeal.”

Perennial tax opponent Tim Eyman has said all tax increases should go to the voters and he is considering an initiative drive to put the tax on the fall ballot.

“For him, it’s not the issue,” Dunshee said of Eyman and Permanent Offense, Inc. “It’s a money-making business for him. He’s got to run with it.”

Despite misgivings about the amount of the tax, Dunshee said he supports some of the projects that would be funded, including an I-5 carpool lane extension and Highway 9 improvements.

“I like the merge lane between Highway 2 and I-5. That’s really going to ease up a bottleneck,” he said. “Traffic is like water and turbulence occurs there.”

A piece he’s not happy with is part of the funding mechanism that could impact his plans for the capital budget: $300 million in bonds that would be sold.

“(Bonds are) what the capital budget lives off of,” he said. “That will put a serious crimp in what we can do, not this biennium but the next biennium.”

Dunshee said the state’s bonding capacity is capped at 9 percent of the budget and using some of that capacity for transportation will leave less for other projects.

“We were trying to do a burst for higher education,” he said. “The average community college building costs about $20 million, some more, some less,” he said. “You can add up, across the state, how many community college projects that is.”

Dunshee said he will try to make that point to Locke before the transportation bill is signed.

On education, Dunshee said the House was trying to protect some money for teachers, giving a 2 percent raise in the second year of the budget. “That’s important stuff,” he said.

Dunshee said the charter school bill that almost received a vote and will likely resurface in the special session is not the revolutionary change proposed in other years.

“We have charter schools now,” Dunshee said, pointing to focused or “choice” schools available in some districts. “This just allows what we have now.”