Washington State Senate Democrats: Adam Kline

Governor signs Sen. Kline’s “driving while poor” bill

Senate Democrats — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:04:55 GMT

The crime of Driving While License Suspended in the 3^rd Degree is the lowest level of driving with a suspended license. While the charge is criminal in nature, it can arise simply because a person is unable to pay the fine on a non-safety civil traffic ticket but still needs to drive to get to work.

Some legislators have taken to calling this charge, “driving while poor.”

Senate Bill 6284, which Gov. Gregoire signed into law Friday, reforms the state’s DWLS3 law by authorizing a civil collection process for unpaid fines for non-moving infractions such as expired tabs or other non-safety issues. The inability to pay or a delay in paying a non-moving traffic fine will no longer result in a suspended license for failure to pay the fines.

“A lot of folks just don’t have the resources to pay their fines and/or deal with the court process, and they end up with a criminal charge and increased fines,” said Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, the bill’s prime sponsor. “The purpose of this bill is to try and keep people from having a civil matter turn into a criminal one for driving while poor.”

This bill helps to preserve what may be the most valuable asset for poor people – cars and the licenses to drive them. Washingtonians should not have to face losing their jobs, Kline said, because it is a crime to just drive to work – all because they cannot afford to pay a traffic ticket.

It is estimated that this reform could save local governments $36 million per biennium in court time, prosecutor and public defender fees, and incarceration costs. The city of Seattle implemented a similar program and saved $212,000 last year.

Special Session, the current budget terrain, and deciphering the Republican’s claims about their budget proposal

Senate Democrats — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:02:00 GMT

Today is the last day of our regular 60-day legislative session. The length of our regular legislative session is constitutionally mandated, so we have no choice but to end at the close of the 60^th day. We've been involved in intensive negotiations regarding the supplemental operating budget for the current two-year biennium which ends on June 30, 2013. It became apparent a few days ago that we are not going to be able to come to an agreement.

Soon after the close of the regular session, Governor Gregoire will call the legislature back for a special legislative session. Under state law, a special session can last no more than 30 days but can be adjourned as quickly as the legislature completes its remaining business. If we’re able to reach an agreement regarding the budget, we may be able to come back very soon for less than a week. However, things are very much up in the air at the moment.

The primary focus of special session will be passage of the operating budget, and those bills which are necessary to implement the budget. We may also work on a small number of bills that failed to win passage through both chambers during the regular session, but we don’t want to do anything that detracts from our main focus.

The Current Budget Terrain

As you probably know, the House released their proposed supplementary operating budget a few weeks ago, and the Senate released our proposal last week. Both the House and Senate budget proposals were the culmination of many months of public hearings and an array of other types of discussions. For example, the Senate had extensive hearings on the Governor’s proposed budget during the special legislative session that began in November. Information garnered from the public from those hearings contributed to the Senate budget proposal. Legislators, staff, and members of the public contributed an immense amount of work to craft a practical budget that made cuts, but that mitigated them with revenues from sources other than taxes. Polls performed over the past months made it abundantly clear that the public, measured statewide, still isn’t ready to vote Yes on a referendum creating any combination of new taxes. Both proposals closed a few tax loopholes, including one that had allowed big banks to be exempt from paying taxes on certain interest income.

The House and Senate budget proposals were available to the public online, paper copies were distributed, and many of us had posted info about them on our blogs and in our e-newsletters. The proposal had been openly shared with the minority party, inviting them to contribute. Like many legislators, I’ve responded to hundreds of emails and phone calls about the Senate and House proposals, and have discussed their contents with constituents, advocates, lobbyists and representatives from state agencies and nonprofit organizations and lobbyists. Both had public hearings in their respective Ways and Means Committees. Interestingly, only a few Republican members bothered to sit in on the public hearing, and they stayed only briefly. The budget was met with accolades and relief in the public hearing. It was a budget that left large portions of the safety net intact. It was a budget that made absolutely no cuts to K-12 and higher education, and maintained a $370 million reserve balance.

The House passed their proposed budget, HB 2127, with a vote of 53 to 45 on February 29. Like many legislators, I’ve responded to hundreds of emails and phone calls about the Senate and House proposals, and have discussed their contents with constituents, advocates, lobbyists and representatives from state agencies and nonprofit organizations and lobbyists.

Our plan was to have a floor vote on our budget proposal on Saturday, March 3, thus giving legislators another opportunity to continue to amend it –including those legislators who opted instead to stage a parliamentary coup on the Senate floor. As I described on my blog that night, the Republicans and three Democrats joined together to pass a budget that no other legislator or member of the public had ever seen. The rest of us Democrats made many attempts to improve it via amendments on the floor, but were prevented from doing so by the newly-formed majority.

This comprehensive comparison between the Senate Democrats' budget proposal and that of the Republican caucus lays out the differences between the original Senate proposal and the one passed in the wee hours of the morning Saturday. Nonpartisan information on the various budgets proposed in the Senate can be found here.

Among many other things, the Republicans and their Democrat friends are proposing to cut a host of safety-net programs, including completing eliminating the Disability Lifeline, a program that was maintained at the current level in the Senate Democrat proposal. They would cut $202 million from public assistance for families with children and limit the lifetime benefit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to 48 months across a lifetime. It keeps eligibility for Working Connections Child Care restricted to families whose incomes total 175 percent or less of the federal poverty line. It also cuts 4000 Working Connection Child Care slots. In contrast, the Senate Democrat proposal not only retained current funding for TANF but undoes last year's 15 percent cut to TANF benefits. It would restore eligibility for the Working Connections Childcare (WCCC) subsidy to families whose income totals 200 percent or less of the federal poverty line.

“Gimmicks,” our future potential revenue deficit, and the Republican’s so-called “commitment” to fund education

I’ve been surprised at some of the claims made by the Republicans and the three conservative Democrats who supported the Republican budget, in particular their comments concerning “gimmicks,” our future potential revenue deficit, and their alleged commitment to fund education.

Gimmicks. There seems to be a constant chorus of Republicans stating that their budget included no “gimmicks.” Here, they are indulging in the practice of using a “gimmick” to describe budget strategies that one doesn’t like. Our state is experiencing a major revenue deficit; of course we have to create strategies to move funds around or postpone payments in order to make it through this difficult time. The Republicans were particularly upset about the Democrat proposal to make one $330 million payment to schools a day late in order to count the payment in next year’s budget rather than this year’s. This payment is the monthly payment that the state makes to schools. In our budget, we propose to make the payment currently due on June 30 a day later on July 1. Our budget also proposes to make this one-day change permanent, meaning that we won’t have to make a double payment at some point in order catch up. The schools agreed that this was a workable plan, especially because it enabled us to continue funding a whole host of critical and cost-effective human and health services. This is similar to a family deciding to pay their rent a day late in order to cover the costs of a family member’s emergency healthcare needs.

Although they say their budget includes no “gimmicks” they actually use several similar budget strategies. The budget proposed by Republicans relies on “pension reform” that postpones a $133-million scheduled payment into state pension plans. Unlike our proposed “gimmick,” this one could have many bad consequences. Republicans also rely on a $67 million diversion of hazardous substance taxes into the general fund, most of which is a one-time cash grab. This will negatively impact cleanup activities statewide, costing many jobs and hurting our environment.

Future revenue deficit. Interestingly, the three Democrats who are now voting with the Republicans on the budget claim in a recent op-ed piece that the Senate Democrats were “banking on a ‘get-out-of-town’ budget that would have left us with upward of $2 billion in additional cuts to make next January.” This is a good sound byte – too bad it’s not true.

For one thing, no one can accurately predict what’s going to happen economically in the next several months. There are too many unknowns. Prognosticators have made general estimates that our state would have a $2 billion revenue deficit next year if we continued with our current expenditure commitments, and if the economy continues a fitful recovery. However, the Senate Democrat proposal addresses about $1.3 billion of this possible deficit. First, our budget proposes to make a $330 million payment to schools a day late in order to count the payment in next year’s budget rather than this year’s. As I mention above, we also make this one-day change permanent, meaning that we won’t have to make a double payment at some point in order catch up. When the Republicans make their $2 billion estimate, they seem to be assuming that we would have to make a double payment next year. We won’t, so we can subtract about $300 million from the R’s $2 billion estimate.

Second, the Senate proposal permanently suspends the statute created via Initiative 728, regarding class sizes. This removes $1 billion worth of our current expenditure commitments. We are determined to fulfill the spirit of I-728, and the Supreme Court has mandated that the legislature do a much better job at funding basic education. As I discuss below, our proposal made no cuts to K-12 education and sets us up to more adequately fund schools when our state’s economy recovers.

So, it would be more accurate to say that the Senate Democrat budget would leave us with upward of a $700 million gap between revenue and expenditure commitments, as opposed to the $2 billion that supporters of the Republican budget are saying is inevitable. In addition, I don’t think that the $2 billion figure takes into consideration the $370 million that Senate Democrats committed to leave in a rainy day fund – but frankly, I don’t know how they’re calculating their figures.

Republicans and their alleged love for education. It has been clear to many of us that our state has woefully underfunded education for decades. Teachers, school staff, students and parents have made it abundantly clear that we need to do a better job. According to the US Census, our state ranks about 32^nd of all states in per-student funding for education. This is harmful and shameful. Our state constitution makes it clear that education is the state’s “paramount duty." A recent State Supreme Court decision affirmed this fact, and has mandated that the state step up to our responsibility. By not making any further cuts to K-12 education, the Senate Democrat Budget proposal made a move in that direction.

The Republicans and three Democrats who proposed their budget in the dark of the night called their budget the “Fund Education First” budget. They’ve made multiple statements to the press about how education needs to be our first funding priority.

In spite of all this concern about education, the Republican budget cuts $43.9 million from K-12 education and cuts $30.4 million from colleges and universities. Here’s some examples of their proposed cuts:

· Eliminate $28 million for smaller class sizes in high-poverty elementary schools;

· Almost eliminate the Readiness to Learn program with a $3.235 million cut. This program provides substantial support to students (predominantly pre-school through grade 8) and their families who are significantly at risk by rigorously combining school and community-based resources to reduce barriers to learning, bolster student engagement and ensure that all children are able to attend school ready to learn. RTL is a great program that has proven its success over and over again.

· Cut $950,000 from the Washington Reading Corps, which provides tutoring to improve reading abilities of K-6 students across Washington State, and has created effective collaborations among schools, families, community members, National Service, businesses and state partners.

· Cut $8 million from the Running Start Program, which allows 11th and 12th grade students to earn both high school and college credits through courses at community and technical colleges, and many of its 4-year baccalaureate institutions without paying tuition. The program provides nearly $50 million in annual savings to Washington families through extremely low tuition rates and saves the state $46 million per year.

· A $30 million reduction in state financial aid for low-income college students.

· Cutting $25.67 million dollars in funding for Washington’s Community and Technical College System.

· Making a $12.643 million cut to funding for universities .

Along with cutting funds used for education in K-12 schools, the Republican budget included a $3.3 million reduction to Medicaid programs serving children with disabilities in schools. This is funding for children with severe, special medical needs, including wheel chair assistance and tube feedings. Not providing adequate funding to treat these children is simply not an option, and would create yet another unfunded mandate to our schools.

This doesn’t sound like a “Fund Education First” budget to me.

What’s next? We’re currently working furiously to finish the business we need to complete before the end of the regular session, including passing a supplemental transportation budget. We’re working on concurrences on bills that passed the Senate but were changed by the House before passage. (If a bill passed the Senate but then was amended by the House, the Senate has to decide whether it will concur in the amendments or not.) We’re meeting in our respective caucuses. We’re attempting to pass the supplemental transportation and capital budgets. Senate and House Democrat as well as Republican leadership are negotiating between themselves and with Governor Gregoire regarding the operating budget. I’m involved with several other senators in a Progressive Caucus; we’re discussing the budget proposals with each other, and we met yesterday with Senator Ed Murray (the chair of the Senate Ways & Means Committee) and Senator Lisa Brown (the Senate Democrat Majority Leader) to transmit our input on the budget negotiations.

This morning, the House Democrats proposed a “striking amendment” that they may use to amend the budget sent over to them by the Senate. (A “striking amendment” is one that strikes and replaces an entire bill.) As of this writing, I don’t know whether or not they are going to do so. You can read about their proposal here.

When session ends tonight, I may get to go home to lovely Seattle – but not for long. Stay tuned to find out when we’ll be back for a special session.

Sen. Kline: Republican budget will hurt the most vulnerable

Senate Democrats — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:53:34 GMT

Food Aid in Danger

Senate Democrats — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:39:00 GMT

The original intent of this blog was to tell you that food aid for low-income, immigrant families in our state was in danger.

Now, in light of Friday night's takeover of the Senate by Republicans and three Democrat defectors, the State Food Assistance Program has been eliminated entirely in the Republican budget.

Hopefully through negotiations this is not the final blow to a program that has been under siege in recent years.

As I wrote here, last year a federal judge in Seattle entered a temporary restraining order against the Department of Social and Health Services preventing the agency from terminating or reducing Basic Food benefits (also known as food stamps) for legally documented immigrants. Last year, the judge sided with the immigrants who claimed in court that the decision violated their rights to due process and was discriminatory. The judge said that the state was being discriminatory by cutting the program for legally documented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for less than five years while continuing to use state money to administer a federal food stamp program for the benefit of U.S. citizens and immigrants who have lived here legally more than five years.

Our state legislature created the State Food Assistance Program in 1997 after federal welfare reform mandated that legally documented immigrants had to live in the U.S. for at least five years to be eligible for federal food stamps. Our program provides food assistance to these folks for the first five years in the states. The program had bipartisan support when implemented. But a mixture of harsh economic times, an apparent lack of public support for basic safety-net programs like food assistance for hungry families, and a basic lack of understanding of the idea that all immigrants living in our state are a vital part of our community, have led to cuts like the one made to the State Food Assistance Program.

Anti-immigrant fervor grows during hard economic times. Folks choose to ignore the fact that our state and national economies depend on immigrants. Along with the many other important contributions they make to our communities, most immigrants contribute immensely to our economy through their taxes and work.

On February 29 of this year, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the state's actions were not discriminatory and did not violate due process rights.

The State Food Assistance Program serves about 10,500 households and costs about $16 million a year when it’s fully funded. Last year, the legislature’s operating budget called for a 50 percent reduction in funding for the State Food Assistance Program. Families were protected from a loss of assistance by the court order. The budget we were negotiating maintained the level of funding set forth last year.

With the court order lifted, and the Republican budget leaving these people out in the cold, the future of the program and the good it does for people who have no other options is in serious jeopardy.

A bad day for the democratic process

Senate Democrats — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 08:26:00 GMT

As I sit here in the Senate Chamber, at 10 pm, long after we should have gone home for the evening, I am listening to my Republican colleagues defend the brutal war they are waging against the poor, the old, and the very young in our state.

Until this afternoon, for the previous 53 days of this 60-day legislative session, Democratic leaders of the Senate had worked with their Republican counterparts to create a budget that made the needed cuts, but that mitigated them with revenues from sources other than taxes. (The polling that our Democratic allies have done over the past months have made it abundantly clear that the public, measured statewide, still isn't ready to vote Yes on a referendum creating any combination of taxes.)

So with revenues from other sources—for example, from borrowing on the bond-market, using as collateral our income from the tobacco settlement; and yes, from postponing by one day a scheduled disbursement to the school districts, from this biennium to the next—we mitigated the harshness of the cuts to those least able to absorb them. The Democratic leaders on the Ways and Means Committee, Senators Ed Murray and Derek Kilmer, have invited their Republican counterparts to contribute, as they did last year in an effort that was admired for its success.

But about 2:30 this afternoon, as we churned out this session’s final bills one after another on the Senate floor, a Republican member moved to relieve the Ways and Means Committee of a series of four bills, one of which was Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget from back in December. This bill had been left in that committee while its members built a quite different one, allocating our scarce dollars in different ways, I believe more wisely, allowing some programs to survive through dormancy—and doing so with the input of the minority party’s members on that committee. The motion was made, and a vote taken. It quickly became apparent that two conservative Democrats, Senators Rodney Tom and Jim Kastama, had joined with the 22 Republicans and with Senator Tim Sheldon (a de facto Republican who insists on sitting with us in the Democratic caucus room) to create a new majority. To use a phrase a learned from a bank-robber I once interviewed, they took over the room.

Their modus operandi was not, as expected, to pull up from various committees a group of bills they wanted—the “reforms” they’ve been seeking, by which they meant significant changes in policy—then insist on passing them as a price for voting on the Democratic proposed budget. No, it was something altogether different: a new budget bill altogether, an entirely new proposal being made for the first time on the 54^th day of a 60-day session, an entirely unknown document that within hours could be our state’s budget for the 16 months left in this biennium. Gov. Gregoire’s old budget would be simply the vehicle on which to lay a striking amendment, entirely new language and dollar-figures that had emerged from the proverbial back-room, from a process in which the only goal was to reduce expenditures so they’d be even less than our anemic revenues, leaving a few hundred million more dollars in the reserve. And reduce they did, in a willy-nilly fashion, from rehabilitation services for wheelchair-bound kids, to Harborview’s charity-care fund and helicopter rescue squad, to the Department of Commerce team that searches out export markets for Washington products, to the entire state food assistance program that aids food banks, to mental health programs for low-income families, to half the funding of our family-planning budget, to half the funding for the Running Start program that helps promising low-income students get to college—and the list goes on and on.

I had become comfortable over the past five or six years with the feeling that my Republican colleagues took no joy in these cuts, but that they hued closely, perhaps rigidly, to an aversion to taxes, an aversion that had over years assumed the nature of a religion, and that like a religion had made certain demands of them that mine didn’t, but that I could somehow bring myself to understand. To lower our expenditures to the level of our revenues, rather than raise taxes to meet a reasonable level of expenditures—that’s not my faith, but I try to understand the faiths of others. But the Democratic budget, from which these members were rebelling and against which they enlisted Republican aid, was itself a no-new-taxes budget. The structural difference was the non-tax income that ours had and theirs didn’t: income from bonding the tobacco funds and other sources. This difference is, in the end, no excuse for the cuts, particularly cuts aimed at low-income families and wage-earners.

And so I’m left to wonder: was this an exercise in pursuit of an intellectually consistent ideology, or an exercise in kicking people when they’re down? Or is the Republicans’ motivation not merely love for the ultra-wealthy and the denizens of corporate boardrooms, but an active distaste for the unwashed, the unfortunate, the rest of us?

Well, we’ve just begun debate on final passage of this bill as the clock creeps up on 12:30 on March 3^rd. This day started a lot different than it ended, but the fight is just getting underway.

The Senate Budget Proposal: Not as bad as it could be

Senate Democrats — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 04:24:00 GMT

With only a week left in the 2012 regular legislative session, we are busily making final decisions on policy bills and hammering out our final supplemental operating and capital budgets for the current two-year budget cycle.

The House of Representatives proposed their operating budget last week, and passed it out of the House on February 29. You can read their proposal here. On Tuesday of this week, the Senate released our proposal. (The Senate and House alternate releasing their budgets first.) Helped in part by savings from previous reforms and a modestly improving economy, the Senate’s proposal protects K-12 and higher education from further budget cuts. It manages to not eliminate or further cut many critical educational, health care and public safety services. The budget doesn’t propose new taxes, but it does tap revenue from legislation to end the tax exemption on interest on mortgages for national banks and ends an exemption on sales tax on wind power generation equipment ahead of schedule. The funds saved from closing these tax loopholes will be used to reduce class sizes in K-12 schools.

I strongly believe we should go further to raise new revenue by closing other tax loopholes that benefit only wealthy corporations and individuals or instituting a state capital gains tax, even if it means sending these measures to the ballot for voter approval. I’m working diligently with a group of progressive legislators to make this this happen. I’m happy that the House held hearings this week on proposals regarding the capital gains tax and tax loopholes. Still, it seems very unlikely at this point that we’ll be able obtain even a majority vote on these types of proposals in the legislature.

To re-cap, when the governor released her proposed budget in November, we were facing a $2 billion revenue deficit. We resolved almost $500 million worth of that deficit during the December special session. You can read my summary of our Early Action bill here. In mid-February, we received $425 million worth of good news from the State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council in reduced caseloads and an improved revenue forecast.

The current Senate proposal balances the budget through three major steps:

It reinvests the more than $340 million in savings from the recently improved caseload forecast – savings driven in part by our previous reforms.
It makes approximately $300 million in difficult cuts to non-education state services. In order to preserve services that help large numbers of people, such as the Basic Health Plan, we had to make sacrifices elsewhere.
Third, as was done in a bipartisan fashion last year, and as the governor proposed in November, the proposal delays a payment to schools by one day to move savings into this budget. We also make the change in timing permanent to avoid a continuing burden on future budgets.

We also propose to leave $370 million in our reserve fund – in financial terms, it’s a healthy “rainy day” account.

I worked with a dedicated group of legislators and advocates to prevent major funding cuts to the state Office of Public Defense and the Office of Civil Legal Aid, which provides funding and support to organizations that give legal assistance to low-income people. Our proposal makes no further cuts to many of the social service and health care programs that I and many folks from the 37^th District see as priorities, including the Basic Health Program, the Disability Lifeline, the Behavioral Rehabilitation Program, Family Planning Services, the Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program, Home Care Services, Medical Interpreters, Refugee Services, Adult Day Health, and the Children’s Health Program.

Our proposal not only retains current funding for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), but undoes last year's 15% cut to TANF benefits. It also restores eligibility for the Working Connections Childcare subsidy to families whose income totals 200% or less of the federal poverty line. The aforementioned programs are extraordinarily good public investments, and most have suffered through cuts in the past three years.

Budgets are not just numbers. They are moral documents that describe how our state will attend to its many responsibilities, such as public safety, education, protecting the environment and ensuring the health and welfare of all Washingtonians. The Senate’s proposal is far from perfect. We make too many cuts. We don’t restore funding to many of the critical programs that have been hurt by the $10.5 billion in cuts made over the past three years. This budget does very little to bring balance to our unfair and inadequate system of taxation. But given the current revenue deficit and the Democrat’s slim majority in the legislature, it’s probably the best we can do. At this point, we’re not even certain that we have enough votes to pass our current proposal.

We’ll spend the next week negotiating the contents of the final supplemental operating and capital budget.

You can examine the senate budget proposal in detail here.

The Tax Man Cometh

Senate Democrats — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:28:00 GMT

With just six weeks left until the tax deadline, I wanted to pass on some information sent to me by a couple of local community organizations and our friends at the Infernal, er, Internal Revenue Service.

First, the social service nonprofits want to remind folks about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a federal income tax credit for low to moderate income working individuals and families. A fair amount of people who are eligible for the EITC don’t take advantage of it, and are not receiving the funds they deserve under the law. Folks can find out if they’re eligible here.

Also, people who are among the 70 percent of Americans who made $57,000 or less in 2011 are eligible to take advantage of free tax preparation services available through the IRS Free File program, which provides free access to brand-name tax preparation software—offering taxpayers step-by-step help to prepare and e-file their federal taxes online. This service is made possible through a partnership between the IRS and the Free File Alliance, a coalition of industry-leading tax software companies.

To begin, folks can click on the link above or go to IRS website—www.IRS.gov—and click on the “Free File” icon on the right side of the screen. They’ll then be able to access a list of Free File Alliance member companies and either choose the one that fits their needs, or utilize the “help me find a company” tool. After selecting a tax software company, users will be transferred to the company's website to prepare, complete and electronically file their federal income tax returns. The service is also available in Spanish.
Did I mention that it’s free?

Sen. Kline talks about his decision to stop gun legislation

Senate Democrats — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:53:39 GMT

Sen. Kline talks about reforming "driving while poor" penalties

Senate Democrats — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:45:44 GMT

Marriage Equality and Our State Budget: The Struggles Continue, But Let’s Celebrate the Good News!

Senate Democrats — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:43:45 GMT

Today is the 40^th day of our 60-day legislative session. Tuesday was the cut-off for passing bills out of their houses of origin, with the exception of fiscal bills necessary to implement the budget. Bills that passed the Senate now go to the House, and bills that passed the House now go to the Senate. Right now my colleagues and I are busy ushering our bills through the respective policy committees. Senate committees like Judiciary Committee, which I chair, are all considering bills passed by the House of Representatives.

Along with the cut-off, this week was marked by two major events. On Monday, Governor Chris Gregoire signed SB 6239 into law, making Washington the seventh state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, in addition to Washington, D.C. Later this week, we received a budget forecast that actually provided good news for the first time in a long time.

As for marriage equality, I’m thrilled that our state is finally recognizing that there is no second-class love. You can read more about the historic event here, which is a Seattle Times story that includes a link to sweet video footage of the Seattle Men’s Chorus celebrating the passage of the bill. As I wrote here before the passage of SB 6239, marriage equality is fabulous!

Our work to create marriage equality is far from done. Reports indicate that our newly-minted law will probably be subject to a statewide referendum challenge in November. After we have successfully defeated the naysayers at the ballot box in November, we’ll still have to change the law on the federal level. Only when the federal government institutes marriage equality will we have actual marriage equality. In the meantime, let’s celebrate our successes, and keep organizing!

In the meantime, we’re still working furiously down here in Olympia on policy and budget issues, and we received a bit of good news from the State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, which is tasked with providing a forecast of economic activity and general fund revenue for the Legislature and the Governor to be used as the basis for the state budget. As you probably know, it became clear several months after session ended last year that even the severe cuts we’d made for the last three years would not be enough: the economy continued to falter, and because our tax system depends so much on sales tax, our revenues continued to fall during this recession. During our special session in November, we began to tackle the forecasted $2 billion gap between the expenditures to which we are currently committed and the revenue we were expecting to receive. At the close of the special session, we had taken care of about $500 million; you can read more about that here. That left us with a revenue deficit of about $1.5 billion to address in the regular session. (The actual revenue deficit was close to $1 billion; the projected deficit of $1.5 billion included putting an expected $500 million in reserve in case the economy continued to flounder.)

The latest calculation from the Forecast Council shows an actual increase of $96 million for this (2011-2013) biennium. This revenue is composed of $45 million in increased tax revenues, and $50 million from the change made to the unclaimed property act that was made in the December special session. This reduces the deficit to $855 million deficit for this biennium, plus the need to put some funds in reserve in case the economy goes south again.

Note that this forecast does not consider the economic impact of Congress extending the payroll tax break or extending unemployment. Dr. Steve Lerch, the chief economic forecaster, stated that had that been factored in, it would have increased the forecast by another $50 - $75 million. In addition, there has been a drop in the expected demand for state services that the forecasters predict will save us an additional $340 million. The risks to our economy remain high, but this is the first stable forecast in quite some time. All told, our budget shortfall is down to about $500 million. Again, we’ll also have to put some funds in reserve, so at this point we are trying to come up with a total of about $950 million. We need to put funds in reserve because our recovery is slow and has included many setbacks. You can read more about the current state of the budget here.

The Governor made her budget and revenue proposal in the fall. Now that we have the latest information from the Forecast Council, the House is set to release their proposal next week, and the Senate will follow soon after.

We need to make up for the $950 million we’re lacking by raising more revenue, making cuts, or instituting cost-saving reforms. Like the vast majority of 37^th District constituents who communicate with me about budget issues, my preference would be to raise the majority of that $950 million by new revenues, in the form of progressive taxes that reach the disposable income of those most able to pay. This includes the closure of tax exemptions that primarily benefit wealthy corporations and industries. There also are a number of small cost-saving reforms we can make, but after three consecutive years of cutting almost $10.5 billion, there are few reforms we can make without hurting people further. We've already made too many cuts that are imposing significant burdens on the health and welfare of Washingtonians and will cost us more in the long run.

Folks in the 37^th District seem to have a keen understanding of the importance of supporting critical state programs upon which we or our neighbors depend. We also seem to understand the necessity of reforming our system of taxation so that it no longer overburdens low and middle-income people, who potentially pay 20 percent of their income toward state taxes while the very wealthy often pay less than 3 percent of their income in state taxes. As I wrote here, we tend to agree with Governor John Rankin Rogers (Washington’s governor from 1897-1901), who said, “I would make it impossible for the covetous and avaricious to utterly impoverish the poor. The rich can take care of themselves.”

For example, I’ve heard from thousands of constituents about the Basic Health Program (BHP), which offers state-subsidized health insurance coverage to low and middle income folks. BHP isn’t free to participants, who still have to step up to pay premiums and co-pays. It’s a very good state investment that improves the lives of participants and saves the state money in the long run. It’s a model that other states are using to develop similar plans. The BHP was created 30 years ago with bipartisan support, and has, in the past, been favored by members of both parties and supported via initiative by a vote of the people. Enrollment was set at 200,000 in 1995 by a Republican-controlled legislature, but we’ve never met that commitment. Instead, we’ve whittled the program down consistently through various fiscal crises; now the BHP has only 35,000 enrollees, with nearly 160,000 people on the waiting list. This in a state where more than a million people don’t have health insurance coverage. Hopefully, federal health care reform will assist many of the folks who are currently uninsured, but it doesn’t go into effect until 2014. The BHP is all we have right now to address the immediate needs of hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians.

The BHP is just one example of many good state investments that are in danger. How can we raise more revenue to pay for these in a way that doesn’t overburden Washingtonians who are already struggling to get by? The Governor proposes a half-cent increase in the retail sales tax for three years. I appreciate that it's time-limited, but the sales tax falls harder on low-income people than other taxes, and her version is neither dedicated to governmental functions that aid low-income people, nor does it have a mechanism to allow rebates to low-wage earners, as did Rep. Eric Pettigrew's version from a few years back. With the relatively good news of the recent economic forecast, it’s beginning to look like this proposal is off the table, or at least will be reduced to maybe one or two tenths of a percent.

One alternative is to securitize more of our income from the settlement of the lawsuit against the tobacco industry. We could get $180 million needed to “bridge” both the BHP and the Disability Lifeline to 2014 by selling bonds that would be paid by that stream of income. Interest rates are low, so this is a good time to do it.

I’m interested in closing tax loopholes that benefit wealthy corporations, but provide no benefit to the rest of us. There are more than 500 tax breaks in Washington state. In aggregate, they cost us billions of dollars in foregone resources each year. Some, like the sales tax exemptions on food, serve a valid public purpose and should be retained. Others offer little public benefit.

One tax loophole that’s garnering the most attention in the legislature right now is the tax break for big banks. Unlike every other state in the union, Washington doesn’t charge taxes on interest earned by banks on a home’s first mortgage. Like many progressives, I’ve wanted to close this tax loophole for years. Even the Republicans are finally beginning to understand how unpopular this tax exemption is, and how this particular tax exemption is offering no benefit except to banks, who aren’t passing the extra money around to their customers or staff.

Some Republicans have said that they now support keeping the mortgage exemption for smaller state-based banks, but think it should end for the five big, multistate institutions: Wells Fargo, Citi, KeyBank, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Republican support could mean that we could get a supermajority vote in the legislature on implementing this change, which would raise about $18 million for the current state budget and prevent us from having to send the measure to the voters. Closing the loophole for all banks, including Washington-based community banks, would bring in closer to $40 million.

There are other closures of tax loopholes that are strongly being considered; I’ll write more about them in my next post. In the meantime, I wanted to tell you about one important step we’re taking to address unfair and ineffective tax exemptions. Last week, the Senate passed SB 6088, a bill that I co-sponsored which would require that any new legislation which institutes a new tax preference, or expands or extends an existing tax preference, include an expiration date and statement of legislative intent. The intent section would provide information regarding the reasoning for the exemption and data for purposes of reviewing the tax preference. It would make it much easier to repeal tax exemptions that aren’t serving their intended function.

Currently, our tax code is full of exemptions with no declared purpose or end date. I co-sponsored SB 5857 that would go a step further than SB 6088 by requiring that all 567 tax current breaks have a sunset date as well as instituting an objective, mathematical formula for analyzing tax breaks to see if the return on investment is actually worth it. By sunsetting all exemptions and giving legislators an objective way of measuring the effectiveness of tax breaks, we would force tax breaks to undergo the same democratic test that budget expenditures go through—a yea or nay vote during budget deliberations. Exemptions should be looked at with the same rigor as expenditures.

Although it doesn’t go as far as SB 5857, SB 6088 is a good first step.

Along with closing tax loopholes, I am working with other legislators on long-term fixes to make our tax system more progressive, such as a capital gains tax.

While considering options regarding revenue, we are also working hard to maximize the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of public programs. The Senate was able to pass about 30 reform bills in the past few months. If all these bills pass the Legislature, the savings are estimated at approximately $40 million for this biennium and at least $250 million over the next five years. The reform agenda targets all areas of government including job creation, economic development, fraud prevention, corrections, transportation, education, the environment, and human services. You can read more about these reforms here.

Keep up the good fight!