$5.2 BILLION OF spending has been cut from the state budget in the past two years.
Fiscal trends indicate that an additional $3 billion will have to be cut in the 2011-2013 biennial budget, and still $9 billion more in the 2013-2015 biennium.
Gov. Chris Gregoire laid out those realities before inviting testimony at hearings on “transforming” Washington’s budget on Monday in Tacoma and Wednesday in Everett.
However, “those who made it to the microphones were practically all interest groups [who] showed up en masse, saying protect our program,” said Mike Doherty, one of the three Clallam County commissioners and the sole North Olympic Peninsula elected official appointed to the Governor’s Committee on Transforming Washington’s Budget, a 35-member advisory panel.
Gregoire and the committee wanted suggestions of efficiencies and priorities to guide use of public money.
Instead, advocates, reacting to a turn-out-the-testimony campaign organized by Fuse Washington, just said “no” to change.
“We’ve already slashed billions from our essential public structures,” Fuse campaign director Jim Dawson said in lengthy instructions on how to turn the discussion from cutting spending to raising revenue.
With just over an hour allotted for testimony, only 30 people got to speak for two minutes each per night.
In Tacoma, two of the 30 people defended the state Housing Trust Fund, according to Rachael Myers, executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance.
She happily reported this to the Shelter Providers Network of Clallam County in Port Angeles on Wednesday (a meeting I conducted as part of my employment at Serenity House of Clallam County).
Such testimony didn’t help the committee identify solutions.
More helpful, Doherty said, would be reports on cost-effective projects and management ideas such as specific performance measures that would show whether money is being spent effectively.
“If you don’t measure, you can’t manage,” Doherty said.
But, he added, “people don’t particularly want people to measure what they do.”
He challenged people to “share ways that are working in our community.”
However, suggested efficiencies aren’t always well received.
“There could be large economies of scale,” Doherty said, if the state’s three separate communications systems were coordinated into one centralized system, as most states are doing with aid from federal funding.
“Get rid of redundancies,” he said, noting that each communication system has its own infrastructure, operations, maintenance, and repair crew and the systems can’t all communicate with one another.
However, the agencies operating those systems — Washington State Patrol, Department of Transportation and Department of Natural Resources — “don’t want to cooperate,” he said.
“Become more efficient with technology, and you could probably cut jobs,” Doherty said.
Cutting jobs is another no-no, for advocates, I reminded him.
Clallam County cuts jobs with attrition — not hiring to replace employees who retire or resign, he replied. But state employee unions want no net loss of jobs.
Responding to advocates who testified for preserving mental health funding, Doherty said:
“Take a little more responsibility locally.”
A one-tenth of one percent local option sales tax is available to create a revenue stream for mental health services, but only about one-third of the state’s 39 counties — Clallam and Jefferson included — have implemented it, Doherty said.
The committee’s other hearings are in Vancouver on Tuesday and Spokane on Thursday, but people can also comment in writing, contact Doherty at 360-417-2233, or online at the governor’s website which asks for ideas on “how to transform the budget”– www.transformwabudget.ideascale.com; it got more than 600 comments in its first day.
Pleading for balance, Kirby Wilbur, state director of Americans for Prosperity, encouraged supporters: “Let your voice for less government, less regulation and less spending be heard.”
If Washington doesn’t successfully transform its budget, it could wind up like Europe, where nations such as Britain, Spain and Greece are facing having to cut the size of their governments by 40 percent, Doherty noted.
Nevertheless, Fuse’s Dawson redefines the very word, “budget.”
Instead of being a plan for the allocation of available resources, Dawson says, “the budget is a statement of what we hold dear as a state.”
Understandably, Fuse is a network of the political view that’s also redefining the word progressive.
Can riots, a la Greece, be far behind?
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Martha Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999 and is the secretary of the Republican Women of Clallam County, among other community endeavors.
Martha and her husband, Dale, live on a Carlsborg-area farm. Her column appears every Friday.
E-mail: irelands@olypen.com.