Legislature's Budget Battle Continues

WAITSBURG – State Representatives Terry Nealey and Maureen Walsh stopped by The Times' office last week to discuss the on-going 2016 legislative session and some of the sticking points that are keeping legislators at work past the scheduled 60-day deadline.

Nealey and Walsh are both Republican members of the House, representing the 16th Legislative District, which includes Columbia and Walla Walla Counties.

The Republican-led Senate and the Democratic-led House of Representatives failed to agree on a supplemental budget by the scheduled March 10 end of the regular session. Governor Jay Inslee immediately called the legislature back into special session.

A small number of negotiators from both the house and the senate were meeting last week, and the remainder of the legislators were on standby. The meeting at The Times occurred while Nealey and Walsh waited for a callback.

As The Times was going to press on Tuesday, legislators had returned to Olympia and were set to vote on a compromise supplemental budget that day.

At the time he called the special session, Inslee also vetoed 27 bills that the legislature approved during the session, a move that had both local legislators puzzled.

"We don't understand it," said Nealey. "Most of them were passed unanimously. A lot of them were agency requests." Nealey and Walsh both said that the legislature will likely be able to override most of those vetoes, but were clearly annoyed at the extra hassle that will entail.

Regarding ongoing budget negotiations, Walsh said, "It's not like nothing's being done or they're all just having a stare-down or anything. There is work being done."

Walsh said the biggest sticking point is a requirement that the budget be in balance based on four-year revenue forecasts. This requirement was passed only a couple of years ago, she said.

"We, as Republicans, think that is pretty sound policy," Nealey said.

"Democrats say we could be done and out of here if we only had to look ahead two years," Walsh added.

At the end of the regular session, the Democratic-controlled house had proposed $467 in new spending, while the proposal from the Republican-controlled senate was for only $34 million in added spending. These would be additions to a biennial state budget totaling nearly $40 billion.

The other important difference between the two proposals is that the house proposal includes significant tax increases, while the one from the senate includes none.

One of the most important issues the legislature is facing this year is how to pay for as much as $150 million or so in costs to fight wildfires last summer. The house proposal includes dipping into the state's "rainy day fund" reserves to pay these costs.

"We (house Republicans) may be in agreement at this point," Walsh said. "We also recognize that that's an emergency. The Republicans really did not want to use that funding for the wildfires, but as we examined that a little bit further, and as we were negotiating, I think it became more apparent that maybe some of that money may need to come out of reserves."

The House budget proposal also includes substantial increase in funding for mental health and homelessness. Walsh said that one of the sticking points is a requirement by the state supreme court that jail or prison inmates must be able to get a mental health evaluation within seven days of their incarceration.

"We came back and said, how about 14 days, based on resources, personnel, and in some of these more rural communities, it's very hard to get an evaluator in there within seven days," Walsh said. "The court said 'not good enough.'"

The extra cost to meet the seven-day requirement will run into hundreds of millions of dollars, she said.

"Even though we've allocated a lot of money for it, we don't have enough qualified personnel for it," Nealey said.

Another big issue the legislature faces is education funding, and meeting the requirements of the state Supreme Court's "McCleary decision" from 2012, which held that the legislature wasn't meeting its requirement under the state constitution to provide public K-12 education. However, Nealey and Walsh said that that is not a component of the supplemental budget being negotiated this year.

Walsh said that a team from Washington State University has been tasked with providing an evaluation of how local school district scome up with and use funding, both local and state.

It comes down to an issue of local control, she said. "You know, local control, everybody's for it, but when it comes down to big funding issues, it becomes a little problematic, because you do have a vastly different dynamic in each district, of how much the locals are picking up. It rolls into the levy equalization issue between wealthy districts and poorer, more rural districts," Walsh said.

"Next year we will come back and figure out appropriations based on information that's been gleaned this year," she added.

"The court set 2018 as the deadline, so that's what we're working toward," Nealey said.

During the meeting at The Times, Nealey and Walsh discussed a number of other issues that were addressed by the legislature this year, but were unrelated to the budget. In next week's issue, we'll cover some of those discussions.

We'll also hear what they had to say about their plans for running for office in this year's elections.