State budget writers are inching closer to an agreement that will hopefully be presented to legislators for approval next week.  Time is of the essence – the fiscal year ends June 30.

We are fighting for a budget that takes a good step toward funding education without rigging the system against seniors, kids, and people with disabilities.

The negotiators received two shots of good news this week:

·         The Economic and Revenue Forecast Council reported they expect $231 million more in revenue over the next two years than they previously projected.

·         The Caseload Forecast Council, which keeps track of how many kids are in our schools, inmates are in our prisons, seniors are in nursing homes, etc., projected a savings of $90 million for the next biennium.

This welcome news is tempered, of course, by the Supreme Court’s McCleary decision, which ordered the Legislature to increase spending on K-12 education by at least $4.5 billion by 2018.

Another thing to keep in mind is how much has been cut from state spending in recent years – around $12 billion from all kinds of state services including parks, environmental clean-up, senior day care, teachers’ salaries, etc. And that was before the McCleary decision was handed down.

So, while these good forecasts get us closer to a go-home budget for this year, we can’t pretend we’ve solved the long-term problem of adequately funding our kids’ education.  There is still much work to be done in the coming years to meet our constitutional and moral obligation.

More good news on the economic front

Washington state’s unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 percent last month and the state added an estimated 4,100 jobs, the Employment Security Department reported Wednesday.

The May jobless rate is down from April’s rate of 7 percent, and well below the national unemployment rate of 7.6 percent.  While state and national unemployment trends are positive, unemployment is still stubbornly high in the 24th legislative district.

Economists say that our unemployment rate has fallen by 0.7 percentage points since the start of the year, and it is now the lowest since November 2008, when the rate was 6.5 percent.

However, more than 119,000 Washingtonians claimed unemployment benefits last week, so there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

That’s why we are working to get a capital budget and a transportation package approved this session.  These investments in roads, bridges, schools, colleges, water projects, and other public infrastructure are good for our businesses and they create lots of jobs all over the state.