Gov. Gary Locke has (grudgingly, we assume) taken on the role of Grinch this holiday season, revealing plans this week for a budget balanced with “deep and painful” cuts but no new taxes.
While the Legislature won’t weigh in until January, there’s sure to be plenty of pain to go around. Locke’s plan calls for cutting almost 60,000 lower-income Washingtonians off the state’s Basic Health Plan, adding to the ranks of the uninsured at a time when medical costs are again skyrocketing. Salaries would be frozen for all state employees, and 2,500 would get pink slips. Higher education and health services would be trimmed, and thousands of low-risk offenders – drug cases, mostly – would get out of jail early.
Most notably, Locke calls for suspending two overwhelmingly popular, voter-passed education initiatives that earmarked money for higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes. Nothing personal, the governor told the state’s teachers, but we simply can’t afford cost-of-living increases for anybody, nor can we afford smaller classrooms in light of a deficit that may hit $2.5 billion for the next two years.
Suspending the initiatives would cost Bainbridge public schools about $1 million in lost revenue (and a dozen teaching positions) in 2004, leaving local educators frustrated at best. “It appears to be a very political decision,” Bainbridge Superintendent Ken Crawford commented this week. “I just have to ask to what political group (Locke) is pandering. It’s apparent that it’s not the parents and teachers of this state.”
While the state’s faltering economy is partly to blame for the fiscal mess, a far greater problem is the inconsistent initiatives passed over the last three years, in which voters have both slashed taxes and mandated more spending. Gov. Locke’s budget acknowledges what should have been obvious all along – that you can’t do both. His proposed education budget does indeed ignore the will of the voters for higher teacher pay and smaller classes, but the will of the voters in aggregate simply can’t be carried out.
Yet teachers raise a valid point. Why, they ask, isn’t anyone talking about suspending the tax-cutting initiatives that made Locke’s proposals necessary? If the value-based Motor Vehicle Excise Tax – a victim of I-695 and then the Legislature itself – were reinstated, teachers could have their voter-mandated raises, and schools could move forward on their voter-mandated efforts to reduce class size. We might even have a few dollars left over for transportation.
What Locke has done with his budget is assume that when push comes to shove, Washington voters really want lower taxes more than they want higher teacher pay and smaller classrooms. But that’s not at all self-evident, especially since the school-spending initiatives actually passed by far larger margins than the various tax-cut initiatives.
While we’re certainly not in the “put everything to a vote” camp, perhaps this is a good time for a referendum: Why not publish two state budgets, one with fewer cuts and selected higher taxes, the other with no new taxes but draconian cuts? Put the alternatives to a vote in June, and the state would have its budget by the time the biennium begins in July.
Conflicting messages from the voters got the state into this mess. It would be interesting to see which view prevails.
