OLYMPIA — With both chambers of the state Legislature having passed supplemental budgets, negotiations will begin this week to hash out a version acceptable to both the Senate and House of Representatives.
“We will sit down and the compromises will start,” Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, said Friday.
Hargrove — along with Rep. Steve Tharinger, D-Sequim, and Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim — represent the 24th District, which covers Clallam and Jefferson counties and part of Grays Harbor County.
“We are quite a ways away” from coming to a compromise, “and we are going to have to work through that in the next two weeks,” Hargrove said.
Both budgets fund mental health and wildfires, but with a difference of about $400 million in funding altogether.
The House passed the Democratic supplemental budget proposal on a 50-47 vote on Thursday.
The plan seeks money to reduce homelessness and raise the state’s portion of the lowest starting salary for public school teachers to $40,000 a year, according to The Associated Press.
The budget would add about $476 million to the two-year, $38 billion budget approved in 2015, including about $318 million from the state’s stabilization account — commonly referred to as the “rainy day” fund.
Several Republicans spoke in opposition to the budget on the House floor Thursday for using rainy day funds to pay for homeless programs, according to The Capitol Record.
Democrats argued that homelessness is an emergency and cannot wait until next year’s budget.
“Like most legislators, there are things in [the budget] that I don’t like,” Van De Wege said Friday.
“We used the budget stabilization account a lot, and I prefer not to do that. I would love to limit our usage of that account.”
However, “there are some legitimate issues — we have some serious problems with mental health and homelessness and wildfires — that is what we spent the money on, but I would prefer to keep the budget stabilization account as large as possible for when the next recession hits,” Van De Wege said.
The Republican-controlled Senate took up its supplemental budget on the floor Friday afternoon, according to The Capitol Record.
It adds about $49 million in spending to the current budget, largely focused on mental health and wildfires.
It also provides $6.6 million for charter schools to stay open in Washington after a state Supreme Court decision threatened to close the schools.
The Senate budget passed on a 25-22 vote.
“The House did use the rainy day fund, the Senate did not,” Hargrove said.
“But, I expect that we will end up — I am sure — using it for at least fires and maybe some additional things,” although “probably not to the extent that the House did.”
The House also released a bipartisan construction budget that would put $1 billion toward building schools in coming years.
House Bill 2968 would put $1 billion into building schools from 2016 to 2025 by shifting half a percent of what flows to the budget stabilization account and utilizing it in the education construction fund, with an initial transfer of $186 million to build classrooms.
The proposed construction budget also includes $10.8 million for a pilot project to build classrooms with cross-laminated timber, an innovative new construction method that could create local jobs and make it profitable to thin forests, thus reducing the danger of wildfires, said Tharinger, chair of the House Capital Budget Committee and a sponsor of the bill.
“Our state is growing, so we need to build classrooms for the more than one million kids in our public schools,” he said.
The bill would provide funding to build modular classrooms that would replace portable classrooms, Tharinger said.
Could help Sequim
If approved, the bill could help provide four new classrooms for Greywolf Elementary in Sequim, Tharinger said.
“In Sequim, they have had trouble passing their bond[s]” to fund new school construction, he said.
“They need Helen Haller completely replaced, [but] at Greywolf they only need four new classrooms, so this would be an option that might work for them. There is a good chance we might be able to help them out there.”
Tharinger said the bill is not intended to negate the need for local levies and bonds.
“We don’t want to give [school districts] the impression they are off the hook for their responsibility to fund their schools,” he said.
“It does work when we have this huge need for classrooms . . . so we just want to focus on where we can put in a more permanent classroom with this material.”
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Reporter Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56650, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
