That’s why Gov. Chris Gregoire is smart to bring lawmakers back to town in mid-November for a special session. They can get the next of round of bad economic news, then craft a 2011-13 supplemental budget that factors in the latest revenue estimate.
Lawmakers should be able to complete the task well before Christmas, so when they come back to Olympia in January for their 90-day session, they can focus their attention on policy matters, not budget issues.
That’s a reasonable course to follow as the sooner the next round of budget cuts are in place, the less deep those cuts will have to be.
That’s not to say the budget-balancing act ahead will be an easy one. It won’t. Olympia lawmakers have been in “cut mode” for more than three years. They’ve pretty well trimmed away the fat and are down to bone. The question is where do they find another $1.4 billion in spending cuts and, secondly, should tax increases be part of the mix.
Forecaster Arun Raha set the stage for the task ahead when he said, “In normal times, it would be hard to find a reason to explain the distress in Washington’s economy given all that it has going for it. These are not normal times.
“We are in the fragile aftermath of the Great Recession where a return to normalcy seems like a mirage in the desert – the closer we get to it, the further it moves away,” Raha said. “Fear and uncertainty have overwhelmed consumer and business behavior. Every time our state has looked like it would break out of the malaise, it has been sucked right back in.”
Raha said job growth will continue at a slow pace — failing to recover its past peak in Washington until sometime in 2013. He cited global uncertainty caused by European debt worries and U.S. congressional gridlock as factors holding back the consumer spending that normally stokes the economy and fills state coffers.
“I’d like to assure you this nightmare will end. But I don’t see an end in sight,” Raha said in his report to the state’s Economic and Revenue Forecast Council last week.
Gregoire signaled her intent for a special session when she said, “We can’t wait until the start of session in January to take action. Today’s forecast demands that we again take action.”
We agree. So it’s back to Olympia for the 147 lawmakers to again rewrite the state budget to account for the $1.4 billion (or more) anticipated shortfall in revenue.
Talk of tax increases or closing tax breaks for industry will be met with opposition by Republicans who insisted on an all-cuts budget during the 2011 regular and special sessions. Republican Rep. Ed Orcutt of Kalama is one who has voiced worry about how tax increases would affect jobs and family incomes.
State budget director Marty Brown said the new revenue drop presents the state with a projected $1.28 billion deficit in June 2013. But how quickly the state’s small $163 million cushion evaporates remains a question, Brown said.
By law, Gregoire would have to enact across-the-board cuts once the state is in a deficit-spending position, unless lawmakers took action.
Across the board cuts are not the answer.
Take the Department of Corrections, for example. With across the board cuts, officials would likely have to release prisoners early, end community supervision of felons or close one of the prisons such as the penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Budget writers need flexibility. There is no flexibility under across the board cuts.
We were a bit surprised that Senate Republican budget writer Joseph Zarelli from Ridgefield, offered another option: giving Gregoire more leeway in making cuts during fiscal challenges such as this one. We never thought we would see lawmakers ceding their budget-writing responsibility to the governor, but Zarelli is at least toying with the idea.
Last year, lawmakers were able to come together for a one-day special session on Dec. 11, to adopt a bipartisan budget fix. That should be the model for the special session the governor calls after the November revenue forecast.
