Washington lawmakers made tough decisions to cut $5.1 billion from the state budget, Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, told members of the Greater Redmond Chamber of Commerce at a luncheon on Wednesday.
Hunter, who serves as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, spoke on the structure of the budget and how legislators arrived at their decisions.
“We were able to come out with a budget that was thoughtful, sustainable and responsible,” he said.
To create the budget, the Legislature had to make structural and policy-level changes. Hunter said lawmakers generally pass five to 10 new bills to make this happen, but this budget was so intricate that 64 bills were deemed necessary.
“We reached pretty deep into the functioning of how the state works to change things so we could make rational decisions,” he said.
Hunter gave the example of funding health care for children living 200 percent or more below the poverty line.
“One of the big fights we had in the budget was if [children’s health care] was going to continue to be an entitlement, or are we going to cap the amount of money going into it and therefore make a waiting list,” said Hunter, who represents the 48th District, which includes Redmond.
In the end, legislators chose to keep it as an entitlement program.But when it came to funding other areas, lawmakers made cuts. They voted to decrease K-12 education funding by 12 percent over the next two years.
Eight hundred million dollars of these cuts stem from a freeze on Initiative 728 which was passed in 2000 in an effort to reduce class size. Hunter pointed out that this should not be seen as a new cut because this funding was already frozen once in the 2009-2011 budget.
“Trying to get some perspective on it requires that you look at the budget in different ways,” Hunter said.
Lake Washington Schools Foundation President Terri Blier is disappointed in the education cuts. She supported the campaign for I-728 and felt its passage demonstrated the importance of education funding to voters.
She said that without the promised funding, class sizes will increase, which especially poses a problem to students in kindergarten through fourth grade.
“Those are very critical grades,” she said. “Giving children educational opportunities at an early age helps them develop that base, that foundation and that groundwork to further their learning.”
Gov. Chris Gregoire signed the 2011-2013 budget on Wednesday. It will take effect on July 1.
Amy Sisk, a sophomore at the University of Montana, is a summer intern for the Redmond Reporter.
