In Our View: K-12 Will Win in Legislature

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we’ll go ahead and hand out the trophy. The winner and new champion from the 2015 session of the Washington Legislature will, undoubtedly, be K-12 education.

Fueled by the power of the state Supreme Court’s decision in McCleary v. Washington, public schools are destined to triumph in the session that begins Monday. The court has ordered lawmakers to live up to the state constitution’s dictate that K-12 education is the paramount duty of government, and anything short of notable progress toward that could result in sanctions against the Legislature and a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.

Whether or not the Legislature does enough to appease the court remains to be seen, but there’s little question that public schools will be granted a large infusion of funding from state coffers. Which brings us to the speculative portion of any legislative preview: The budget-writing process inherently has winners and losers, with some worthy endeavors coming under a scalpel. And that is where things will get particularly difficult. Mental health care, transportation infrastructure, and higher education also will demand attention from lawmakers — i.e. money from taxpayers — and the list of priorities creates a daunting situation for budget writers.

The issue of mental health care can serve as an abject lesson of the burdens. During the Great Recession, lawmakers slashed funding for treatment centers and closed psychiatric wards. The predictable result was that people who need care wound up in hospital emergency rooms, which had neither the staff nor the facilities to adequately address their problems. This practice of “psychiatric boarding” recently was deemed unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, landing the issue higher on the Legislature’s priority list and demonstrating the effects of eschewing funding for social services.

Transportation also has been largely ignored in recent sessions, and the need for funding is growing dire. Highway improvements have a direct economic impact in helping workers, goods, and services get where they need to go, and improved transportation will be essential if Washington is to fully recover from the recession. Republican lawmakers, however, are right to call for reforms in the Washington State Department of Transportation — as demonstrated by ongoing fiascoes surrounding the Alaskan Way tunnel and the state Highway 520 bridge in Seattle.

The linchpin in all this, of course, is money. Gov. Jay Inslee, despite running for office in 2012 on a platform of no new taxes, has proposed two major increases: A 7 percent capital gains tax, and $1 billion a year in carbon-emission fees from about 130 state businesses. While both proposals are certain to create a political dogfight, they would help ease Washington’s highly regressive tax system, which places an undue burden on those citizens who are least able to pay. The carbon-emission tax, in particular, is an innovative idea that likely in the future will become common practice throughout the country, but for now it will take legislators and constituents awhile to wrap their heads around the concept. “I’m a person who believes sometimes new ideas are good ones,” Inslee recently told The Columbian.

The bottom line of the state’s bottom line is that new ideas will be necessary for the upcoming legislative session. Budgets inevitably are a statement of priorities, and Washington’s priorities are numerous and burdensome this time around. The winner already has been declared; all that remains is to see which funding priorities wind up on the losing end.