Gregoire to lobby for federal dollars in Washington, D.C.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Gov. Chris Gregoire will travel to Washington, D.C., to plead with Congress not to leave Washington state with a new $480 million hole in its budget this year.
Gregoire was attending the Western Governors’ Conference in Montana on Monday. She will fly to the nation’s capital with a bipartisan group of governors today. All had counted on receiving a share of $16 billion in federal aid in the form of increased Medicaid payments to help plug large state budget deficits.
The governors will hold a news conference at the capital Wednesday, according to state budget office spokeswoman Kate Lykins Brown.
Gregoire had been crossing her fingers that the U.S. Senate would pass a massive jobs bill that contained aid to states hard-hit by the recession. Facing a $3 billion state budget deficit this spring, she built the $480 million in federal aid into the state’s 2010-11 supplemental budget. The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed the budget in April.
But with the failure of U.S. Senate Democrats to win a filibuster-proof majority in support of the jobs bill Thursday, Washington is among 30 states left holding the bag. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was one of several Democrats who took to the floor of the Senate to urge passage of the bill, which also would extend unemployment benefits to more than 200,000 people per week nationwide.
A spokeswoman for Gregoire said the governor remains optimistic.
“Even though things are frustrating in D.C., we are still holding onto hope that this money will come through,” said Karina Shagren. “Plan B would be either calling the Legislature into special session or making across-the-board cuts.”
Gregoire won’t make that decision until Congress takes its August recess, Shagren said.
“If we don’t receive the $480 million, we’ll have to look at reductions across the state,” said Lykins Brown.
State Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, said that if the additional federal revenue doesn’t come through, and if Gregoire is unable to make the necessary cuts in the budget while still leaving a healthy reserve fund, legislators “have the responsibility to go in and make those changes.”
“Whatever is done has to be done in a permanent way,” said Zarelli, the ranking Republican on the budget-writing Senate Ways and Means Committee. “We will need structural changes that can carry us through the rest of this biennium and the 2011-13 biennium. The sooner we make those reductions, the better.”
Zarelli said he can’t fault Senate Republicans for refusing to support the jobs bill, which would add an estimated $30 billion to the nation’s $13 trillion national debt.
“It makes sense that the federal government start taking a look at its balance sheet, because they are in a lot greater trouble than any of the states are,” he said. “I don’t think it’s healthy to keep digging yourself deeper. Whether it runs out in January or June, we have to start living within our means as well. I thought it wasn’t real smart of us to rely on revenue that was tenuous.”
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