By Melissa Santos
The News Tribune
Republican legislative leaders released a new two-year budget proposal Tuesday that aims to fix how Washington state pays for schools, but would trim spending elsewhere to make that happen.
The $43-billion spending plan released by Senate GOP leaders would impose a new statewide property tax to pay for education, while reducing local school district levies to offset some of the costs to taxpayers.
Overall, the Senate plan would add about $1.8 billion to the state’s K-12 school system over the next two years. To help find that money, the GOP plan would reject nearly all of the collective bargaining agreements Gov. Jay Inslee’s office reached with 38 employee unions, and instead award state workers flat raises of $500 per year for the next two years.
Senate leaders would save about $250 million over two years by not funding the contracts as negotiated, which included cost-of-living raises of roughly 6 percent for state workers in the 2017-19 budget cycle.
The GOP plan would approve only two of the labor contracts: the ones negotiated with State Patrol employees and corrections workers. Money would be provided to pay for health care benefits negotiated with the other labor unions.
Rejection of the labor contracts is bound to face opposition in the Democratic-controlled state House, where leaders have said they need to provide salary increases to retain and recruit workers. The Senate is controlled by a conservative majority of 24 Republicans and one rogue Democrat.
State Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia and the Senate’s chief budget writer, said his budget looks to prioritize about $3 billion in new state revenue toward education, without raising taxes for most Washingtonians.
He and other Republicans have objected to the cost of the state worker contracts, and have been dissatisfied that lawmakers aren’t more directly involved with the negotiations, which occur in private meetings between unions and the governor’s budget office.
“I’m not saying that we don’t value our state employees,” Braun said Tuesday. “We just think that’s a decision that should be done at the Legislature, in the legislative process.”
Braun added approving the largest labor contracts in state history doesn’t make sense when the state is under a court order to fix the way it pays for schools by September 2018.
In the McCleary case, the state Supreme Court has said the state must take on the full costs of paying school employee salaries, which right now are being paid partly through local school district property tax levies. The high court has said lawmakers must put a plan in place to resolve the McCleary problem by the time they finish their work in 2017.
The new statewide property tax GOP lawmakers would impose to pay for schools would raise about $1.5 billion over the next two years. At the same time, the GOP schools plan would lower local school district levies by about $800 million statewide over the same period, leaders said.
Those numbers are different from what Senate leaders released earlier this year when describing their education plan. Braun said that’s because an uptick in state revenue projections has enabled GOP lawmakers to lower their statewide property tax to $1.55 per $1,000 in assessed value — down from the $1.80 per $1,000 in assessed value they had announced in January.
The Senate budget proposal would spend about $95 million in the next two years to improve conditions at the state’s two psychiatric hospitals, including Western State in Lakewood, which has been plagued by capacity and safety issues in recent years.
Another $75 million over the next two years would go toward boosting enrollment at the state’s four-year universities, as well as toward university scholarships and medical programs.
The Senate budget would help pay for some of that with other reductions, including:
— $109 million in savings from changes to certain state pension plans;
— $60 million by eliminating the Housing and Essential Needs program;
— $44 million by limiting who is eligible for state-funded childcare programs;
— $33 million by limiting eligibility for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
The Senate’s two-year budget proposal also relies on about $200 million in transfers to the state general fund from other state accounts.
Sen. Kevin Ranker, the lead Democratic negotiator on the Senate budget, called the GOP’s proposed cuts to social service programs “unacceptable.”
“I think it dramatically impacts some of the neediest in our state, and that’s just really unfortunate,” said Ranker, D-Orcas Island.
The Senate budget is expected to come up for a vote Thursday on the Senate floor. House Democrats are expected to release a competing budget proposal next week.
