OLYMPIA — Twenty days into an overtime legislative session, the Washington Legislature passed a supplemental budget plan on Tuesday that pays for wildfire costs and puts more money into the state’s mental health hospitals.
The final, negotiated proposal passed the Senate on a 27-17 vote hours after the House passed the plan on a 78-17 vote.
Supporters of the budget said that it wasn’t perfect, but represented compromise between the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-led Senate.
“The whole nature of divided government is that we’ve got to work through and find the compromises,” said Republican Sen. Bruce Dammeier. “I believe this work represents that kind of compromise.”
Several of the lawmakers who voted against the measure argued that the budget doesn’t address education needs, including the so-called “levy cliff,” a 2018 deadline that would reduce school districts’ ability to raise money through local levies. The supplemental budget just promises that if lawmakers haven’t reduced the dependence on local levies by April 30, they can introduce legislation to extend the deadline by at least a year.
“It doesn’t provide the relief that school districts have been begging us for,” said Sen. Christine Rolfes, who voted against the budget.
The budget increases spending in the two-year budget adopted in 2015 by $191 million.
The agreement also includes $7 million for recruiting new public school teachers while retaining existing ones and almost $15 million for aiding homelessness, and would spend $190 million from the state’s emergency fund to address damage from the last round of wildfires. The proposal would not raise taxes, and instead find money by other means, such as shifting $10 million from the state auditor’s Performance Audit account. The budget also relies on $46 million in state taxes currently not being paid by national corporations, the bulk of which are broadcasting companies. The plan waives penalties for the companies in expectation they will begin paying the taxes.
Policy priorities the House argued for, such as raising the state’s portion of beginning teacher pay from $35,700 to $40,000 a year and using money from the state’s emergency fund to aid the homeless, are not in the final agreement.
Democrats said they wanted more money for reducing the state’s teacher shortage beyond the $7 million in the budget plan, but said overall they were happy with the agreement.
“We moved on youth homelessness, we moved forward on education, and we moved forward on mental health,” Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, the House’s main budget writer, said at a news conference. “It’s not everything you want, that’s the nature of a compromise, but I think we can say we did good work.”
Senate negotiators dropped proposals of their own, including efforts to shift money away from reserve funds of regional mental health services and change some taxes for out-of-state broadcasters. The Senate also initially wanted to pay for wildfire costs through the general fund, rather than the emergency fund, as the House lobbied for.
Republican Sen. John Braun of Centralia, a key negotiator for the Senate, called the agreement a “strong sustainable budget that recognizes the state’s needs but lives within our means.”
On Monday, the Senate passed 27 bills vetoed by Gov. Jay Inslee with enough votes to override the vetoes. House leaders wouldn’t yet commit to overriding the vetoes on Tuesday. Passing a vetoed bill requires a two-thirds majority vote by each chamber.
With the budget work nearly done, lawmakers were expected to adjourn Tuesday night, on the 20th day of the special session. Inslee called lawmakers into the overtime session earlier this month after they did not finish their work within the regularly scheduled 60-day session.
In a written statement Tuesday night, Inslee praised lawmakers’ work.
“We’ll have more work to do next year on education, mental health and teacher recruitment,” Inslee wrote. “But supplemental budgets are largely about modest adjustments and updates to the two-year budget, and that’s exactly what legislators accomplished.”
