From Our Corner

Gettin’ out of Dodge? Not so easy for lawmakers this year. The calendar says we’re about two weeks from the adjournment deadline (April 26) for the Washington Legislature’s grueling 15-week regular session. In recent years, lawmakers have prided themselves on their on-time adjournment. But we’ve begun to catch rumblings from discouraged legislators that their high-centered budget-and-tax talks just might force overtime — or even “rolling recesses” where rank-and-file lawmakers go home and leave negotiators behind to work out a House-Senate-Governor deal. The Senate…

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Legislative Democrats’ tussle over taxes continues, behind the scenes, as does their loathing for a no-new-revenue state budget. The House budget panel pumped out an all-cuts plan earlier this week and a somewhat different Senate’s version is still subterranean.  Legislative leaders, with no overt encouragement from GovGreg, are toying with tax ideas. Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, is leading the “conversation” for a flat rate income tax on folks with high-end income (say, $250k or $500k a year), but that ballot measure isn’t considered likely to…

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In recent decades, Washington has been the poster child for tough-on-crime legislation. Often spurred by crime-of-the-year legislation responding to a particularly heinous crime or a chronic problem like drunken driving, lawmakers have piled up tougher, longer sentences. The tougher-than-thou competition sometimes spilled over onto the campaign trail. But now the soaring Department of Corrections budget has collided with the state’s $9 billion budget problem, and lawmakers find themselves considering closing McNeil Island penitentiary and Green Hill reform school, revisiting sentences and cutting…

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As higher education poises for deep budget cuts in Olympia, Governor Gregoire and others are proposing stiff tuition hikes to help offset. Both houses are contemplating hundreds of millions in higher ed cuts,  estimating that 10,000 or more students might be turned away and thousands of faculty laid off. The House Ways and Means Committee produced its plan Tuesday as part of the House Democrats’ $31 billion two-year budget draft.    Big tuition hikes, accompanied by more student financial aid, are…

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As Washington lawmakers grapple with a deep recession and a budget gap approaching $9 billion, some Democrats are openly talking about something that has been the “third rail” of politics in this state — the income tax. Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown of Spokane, a PhD economist who has deeply studied the state’s tax structure, and Senate colleague Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle are talking about a soak-the-rich tax something like President Obama has advocated. Brown and Kohl-Welles would tax the…

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Some FYI updates for you: –Hans Dunshee, the House construction budget guy, unveils a $3 billion ballot proposal for K-12 and college projects. He calls it a modern-day version of the Works Progress Administration that put many Americans back to work during the Great Depression, and says we could get 90k jobs in the next fews years.  State Treasurer James McIntire, Dunshee’s former House colleague, raises a red flag. He says the state can’t afford that much additional bond debt, and that…

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