Dear friends and neighbors,
Now that session has ended, I’ll be going into more detail in each of my e-newsletters about some of the work we did in different areas. We’ll cover housing, jobs and the economy, public safety, K-12 education, environmental wins, and more. If there’s an issue I didn’t mention that you would like covered please, let me know!
We’re kicking off with an overview of the operating budget. Before we get into that, though, I want to thank everyone who participated in last week’s telephone town hall! We had nearly 4,500 people join us on the call to ask questions, and we covered a lot of our work this session. If you missed it, you can listen to a recording of the event here.
Thanks so much to everyone who attended and asked questions.
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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months talking about the operating budget, in these e-newsletters, in my podcast, at the in-person town hall and telephone town hall, and in meetings with constituents. The operating budget is one of the most important things we do every year in the Legislature. This year’s work was made harder because we started the year with a significant budget deficit caused by slowing revenue growth, increased demand for services, inflation, and unpredictability at the federal level. With that in mind, our budget team spent months combing through the budget to find efficiencies and places we could cut without hurting people’s access to food, health, and shelter. However, we couldn’t fill the deficit with cuts alone. I talked about how devastating that would be in one of my February e-newsletters.
The final budget that passed the legislature relied on a balance of cuts and new revenue, including efforts to modernize and re-balance our tax code. Thanks to this we were able to protect programs that families rely on right now to put food on the table or keep a roof over their head. I’ve got more details about the budget by issue area below:
In K-12 education we made some of the only new investments in this year’s budget, expanding funding for Special Education by $775 million and Materials, Supplies, and Operating Costs (sometimes called MSOC) by $215 million. We’ve heard from schools across the state about funding challenges, and we’re hopeful that these new investments will help. We also maintained our school meals and summer EBT funding at current levels to help make sure that hungry kids can get the food they need.
In higher education we were able to avoid any tuition increases at our public two- and four-year colleges, and continue to fully fund the Washington College Grant – one of the best financial aid programs in the country.
In early learning we fully funded our bargaining agreements with childcare providers and were able to fund a rate increase for Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program providers. Ensuring that wages remain competitive for providers helps keep childcare open and accessible for more families.
Housing and homelessness is one of the only other areas we were able to increase new funding thanks to HB 1858, which closes a loophole in the document recording fee that benefitted big banks. We provide $118 million to help local governments keep shelter beds online, and invest $6 million in youth homelessness diversion and $3 million in tenant right-to-counsel programs.
In health care and public health we continued funding for the Apple Health for Immigrants program, ensuring everyone has access to health care and reducing the demand on emergency care systems. We also protected funding for Cascade Care to help make health care more affordable for Washingtonians across the state. In long term care we funded rate increases for nursing homes, community residential rates, and assisted living bridge rates to help maintain our workforce providing these incredibly necessary services.
For human services and poverty reduction we felt it was critical to maintain pandemic level food assistance. We saw how critical these programs were for keeping kids and families fed over the last few years and maintaining them was one of our highest priorities. In light of federal government attacks on immigrants and refugees we also maintained out Immigrant, Refugee, and New Arrival Supports programs.
In climate and natural resources, we were able to maintain investments in wildfire response and invasive species prevention, and thanks to the Climate Commitment Act we’re able to continue investments in clean energy, clean air, and clean water.
Thanks to HB 2015 we were able to make some new investments in public safety as well, including $110 million over the next four years in ongoing funding for the Community Reinvestment Program, and $100 million this year in grants for law enforcement. We also funded crime victim supports and public defense grants for local government.
In state government we fully funded the collective bargaining agreements for state and higher education employees, with no furloughs and no health care premium changes.
These are a lot of the budget highlights, but I want to be clear that in order to keep these programs funded and make the limited new investments we made, we had to make some pretty painful cuts. That includes delaying valuable new programs that would have helped people across the state, including the Fair Start for Kids Act, which would have expanded childcare programs and a number of other important priorities. These delays are hard, but at the end of the day we decided to prioritize the programs families are already relying on over cutting those programs to fund new ones. I’m grateful that these are just delays and I’m hopeful that these good policies will still go into effect, just a little later than we hoped.