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UPDATE: Gregoire weighs veto of budget provision that turns state auditor into 'bounty hunter'

• Published May 18, 2009

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Gov. Chris Gregoire is looking for ways to veto language in the two-year state operating budget that would spare some of the $29 million that otherwise would be cut from the state auditor’s performance audit budget.

One concern the Democratic governor has about the budget language is that it turns the auditor into a "bounty hunter," Gregoire’s legislative director Marty Brown said today.

The Democrat-controlled Legislature angered Auditor Brian Sonntag, also a Democrat, with its budget cuts. And Sonntag, a mild-mannered guy most of the time, has been unusually loud about the proposed cut.

Sonntag wrote to House Speaker Frank Chopp last month before the final budget was drafted to denounce the cuts, calling them unacceptable. He also wrote Gregoire recently asking for a veto of the cut. UPDATE: Sonntag’s letter includes an offer to "hold in reserve $15 million of funds" in anticipation of lawmakers transferring the money to other uses in the next legislative session.

"The section that sweeps away most of our performance audit funding is ridiculous and offensive both to us and to citizens," Sonntag wrote to Chopp to no avail. "The cuts are unacceptable and will severely undercut our ability to do independent performance audits.''

Andrew Garber of the Seattle Times has this story today about Sonntag's more recent efforts to derail the cuts.

Gregoire's office is now looking at whether she can veto the entire cut to the performance audit budget, relying on Sonntag to hold back some of the money. I couldn’t reach Sonntag’s office immediately, but Brown said Sonntag is "open to that. He's said all along, 'I need to take a cut too.' "

"We’re trying to talk with the auditor right now on a reasonable (compromise) … We had cut him 20 percent; he thought that was legitimate. We’re still working with him on if there is a way we can make this work. We should do that today," Brown said.

Of even bigger concern than the amount of funding appears to be a new incentive built into the budget that, in effect, has Sonntag depending on audit recommendations to be enacted as a source of his future funding.

"We've been concerned about it from the very beginning, just because of the way the legislature wrote the claw back: Do your performance audits and get your appropriation out of what you find," Brown said. "He doesn’t really have a way to do that … We turn performance auditors into bounty hunters."

Gregoire plans to sign the operating budget, or House Bill 12141244, tomorrow at 3 p.m.

And Tim Eyman, who championed Initiative 900’s expanded funding for performance audits, says he’ll be there to give the governor an I-900 T-shirt. UPDATE: That is, he'll give the T-shirt if, as Eyman puts it, Gregoire "does the right thing and saves Sonntag's successful program."

I guess we'll see how that goes over.