"House Passed Operating Budget, May be a While Before We Know What's In It"

Budget work typically involves lots of behind-the-scenes scrubbing and analysis (along with some dealing and trading), followed by apparently hurried voting on a bill that few lawmakers have read. And even with that scenario in mind, this year's legislative session has ended with unusually little public discussion of the final budget.

The House-Senate compromise budget, developed by the majority party, was released early yesterday and passed by the House last night. Brad Shannon writes in the Olympian that Republicans are crying foul. First, because they weren't involved. And then...

And of course the GOP does not like the content of the budget, once members looked at it.

"I think it looks exactly as I would have feared: Empty promises," Rep. Gary Alexander, R-Thurston County, said tonight. "It sets us up for a significant deficit when we come back in 2011 of over $10 billion. ... It's a credit card budget. They just raised their credit card limit and promised we'll pay it off sometime in the future. We're just not sure when.''

There's little doubt that this budget fails to solve the ongoing problem of shortfalls, though that $10 billion estimate is higher than anything I've seen. As the last year and a half of quarterly revenue forecasts has shown, economists have a tough time accurately predicting the future. Easily, though, we can see a shortfall of more than $4 billion in the coming biennium.

TNT political reporter Joe Turner also runs with Alexander's quote and adds this.

The budget relies on $3 billion in federal stimulus aid, $4 billion in cuts and a number of one-time moves to raid a rainy-day savings account, delay pension payments and shift money from construction accounts.

Turner has more on the budget here. And he points out the challenges facing the press corps - and through them, the public - in dealing with the mountain of budget detail in a very short time frame.

I generally am forced to rely on news releases and summaries handed out by the Legislature in writing my very first stories about the budgets -- and all three come out the same day (operating, capital transportation -- and I don't have a chance to read all the detail until after the Legislature adjourns.

We can expect to learn more over the next few weeks, before the governor signs the budget. Despite earlier promises from lawmakers, this has not been a transparent process. That's perhaps understandable when you consider the difficulty in cutting $4 billion from planned spending, but it does contribute to public skepticism about the process.

Speaking of skepticism, the PI reports estimates from the state budget office of $270 million in new taxes and fees over the next two years.