Bill Lyne's blog

Being a state legislator has got to be a pretty crappy job. You get paid enough to qualify for public assistance, you have to abandon your home and family for two or three months a year, lobbyists and constituents assault you every fifteen minutes expecting you to fully understand and solve their problems, you spend a lot of time locked in a caucus room with the same old faces fighting about the same old things, and no matter what you do, you can pretty much count on half the people being mad at you. That’s when you’re in session. When you’re not in session, you have to spend most of your time sucking up to people for money so you can get reelected and go do it all again next year. And, as with college football players eyeing the NFL, the odds of moving on to the true fame and fortune of the other Washington or the Governor’s mansion are pretty damn slim.

So when we here at the blog look toward Olympia and wonder what the heck they could possibly be thinking, we do so without in any way meaning to question the good will and genuine commitment to public service that animates most of our elected representatives.

But geez.

The governor, the house, and the senate have now all laid their budget and revenue cards on the table, so you’d expect to see some clarity beginning to emerge. But all we really know now is that we don’t know much. Almost from the minute they hit the web, the tax packages started to fall apart. Even the things that everybody thought were no-brainers, like taxes on private jets and cigarettes, have gone wobbly as squads of luxury jet manufacturing lobbyists have parachuted into Olympia and 7-11 owners have delivered petitions on behalf of future lung cancer victims everywhere. The senate’s third-of-a-penny sales tax hike was pretty much dead on arrival, the most striking evidence of which was the spectacle of Senator Rodney Tom voting against the budget he wrote.

Maybe the most peculiar thing about the Democratic caucus meltdown is that it has come in midstream. New taxes were always going to be a two step process and the Dems took the first step without a hitch. The suspension of Initiative 960 brought a lot of noise and some lame photo ops for Tim Eyman, but the vote was never in doubt. With all the blather about flouting the will of the people, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Fall line of Republican attack ads are already in the can. Democrats could now go home on March 11 without having raised taxes one dime and still have to face the tax-and-spend charge in November.

So suspending I-960 and then losing the nerve to actually raise some taxes seems a little bit like getting half a root canal—all of the pain with none of the relief.

The Republican and “Road Kill” Democrat position (and the rationale that Senator Tom offered in voting against his budget) is that the legislature hasn’t done the hard work to reduce state government’s “footprint.” Perhaps the most credible evidence that this is nothing more than union-busting bullshit is that the Republicans, when called upon to offer a budget-balancing plan of their own, can do nothing more imaginative than demonize state workers. When the smoke clears after this session, the legislature will have permanently cut at least $4 billion from a $30 billion state budget. Two-thirds of that budget cannot be cut due to constitutional protections and federal mandates. That means that the final damage will be around 30% to 40% of what was available to be cut.

No, the hard work that hasn’t been done is the hard work of genuine tax reform. Washington has the distinction of being a relatively low tax state with an incredibly regressive tax structure. The taxes that are now being proposed would solve some short-term problems and prevent a lot of suffering over the next couple of years, but they will do nothing to reform Washington’s fundamental tax structure. Until we wake up, join the twenty-first century, and move toward income taxes and away from sales taxes, the current chaotic way of doing things will remain the norm.

Part of us hopes that the collapse this time is complete, that the legislature goes home having done nothing, and that the ensuing disaster will help create the political will to follow the Economic Opportunity Institute and Bill Gates’s daddy toward sane tax policy.

But in the all politics is local department, no new taxes means more cuts than have been proposed in anybody’s budget so far. And the universities are the first place they usually come looking for more cuts.

So here’s hoping that the legislature gets it together enough to kick the can a little further down the road.

The big news in Olympia last week was about the budget, but the real show was about tuition in the House Higher Ed committee.
 
No matter how you felt about the bill, you had to like the Senate floor debate on Senate Bill 6562.  That’s the bill that would have given some tuition-setting authority to UW, WSU, and WWU, provided certain performance targets were met and certain financial aid guarantees were made.  It was the lone survivor of four or five bills regarding tuition that were introduced this legislative session.  SB 6562 was introduced by Senate Higher Education Chair Derek Kilmer, but the version that arrived on the Senate floor had significant contributions from Republican Senator Joseph Zarelli.  The ensuing debate and vote were similarly bi-partisan.  Senators spoke thoughtfully and with very little looking over their shoulders for political consequences.  And the 29-19 vote broke along the line of genuine conviction rather than party lines.   
 
Then something happened on the way to the House. 
 
Whatever the House consideration of tuition lacked in substance, it made up for in Olympia theatre.  After passing the Senate, the bill was referred to the House Higher Education Committee, where the chair, Representative Deb Wallace, didn’t schedule a hearing until Tuesday, February 23, the last day to vote bills out of committee.  This tardiness, along with Representative Wallace’s longstanding opposition to university tuition authority, led to speculation that she would attempt to kill the bill procedurally.  This suspicion seemed appropriate when the bill turned up last on an otherwise pretty dull agenda. 
 
The hearing was barely underway when Representative Scott White, a strong proponent of university tuition-setting authority, surprised Representative Wallace by moving that the agenda be changed to make sure that there was ample time for testimony on the tuition bill.  Much hubbub ensued, with the Democrats leaving the room for a fraught caucus, much to the bemusement of their Republican colleagues.  When they returned, the agenda was changed and testimony soon began on SB6562. 
 
Representative White won the procedural battle, but he lost the war.  After more than two hours of testimony, Representative Wallace chose not to have a vote on the bill.  If she had, it wouldn’t have passed.
 
The testimony, on both sides, was generally pretty good.  Everyone, from students to faculty to university trustees and administrators to business leaders recognized that the real problem is years of declining state support for state universities.  They may have differed on how to approach the problem, but they all understood that our universities are facing a crisis.
 
But on the legislator side of the TVW cameras, there was little more than confusion and piety.  The hearing was supposed to be about SB6562, but by the time the testimony began, there were at least two substitute bills—one from Representative Wallace that simply raised the cap on tuition increases from 7% to 9% and one wonderfully imaginative piece of writing from ranking Republican Glenn Anderson that would have kept legislative and university staff busy for years to come trying to figure out what it meant.  The three different bills would have had dramatically different consequences for the operating budgets of the three universities involved, but that didn’t seem to matter to committee members, as all they really wanted to talk about were lofty principles of “accountability.” 
 
Three or four times Representative Wallace announced that “the buck stops with the legislature,” and several other committee members expressed reluctance to transfer authority for what students pay from the people’s elected representatives to unelected trustees and regents who are accountable to no one. 
 
Here at the blog, we feel pretty strongly that trustees and regents should not see their jobs as much more than hiring and firing presidents and raising money, so we’re pretty sympathetic to the idea of not giving more authority to politically appointed rich people who show up for a meeting every couple of months and may or may not know anything about universities.
 
So the accountability argument would have been interesting if . . . any of the bills under consideration had actually given tuition-setting authority to trustees and regents.  But none of them did.  The Senate bill and Representative Wallace’s bill had clearly defined limits on tuition increases and Representative Anderson’s bill didn’t really give anybody authority to do anything. 
 
All the bluster about who is elected and accountable and who isn’t was really beside the point.  And at the end of the day, as almost every other state in the nation has demonstrated, it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  What matters is who appropriates state funds to universities, and that will always be the legislature, and as long as those appropriations keep going down, tuition will keep going up.
 
The nadir of the hearing came when Representative Wallace pushed the whole moral high ground thing too far and gratuitously called the universities untrustworthy liars. She did this in response to University of Washington President Mark Emmert’s testimony.  The whole exchange is worth watching here: 

In response to all the emphasis on accountability, President Emmert points out what everyone from the universities has been trying to point out for a while: pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Washington’s universities are the best in the country.  We’ve felt compelled to point this out at every opportunity in response to all the blog commenters, op-ed writers, and legislators who, no matter how much evidence they see to the contrary, continue to feel that if the universities just cut out all the bloat, greed, and corruption, we’d be O.K.
 
In her response, Representative Wallace doesn’t go quite that far (although she has in the past), but she does continue to pick at a sore that has tormented her since the end of last year’s legislative session.  After last year’s cuts, the universities, the Council of Presidents, and this blog have regularly pointed to the fact that state appropriations to universities were cut by an average of 23%.  This has stuck in the craw of Representative Wallace and some other legislators who feel that we haven’t been appropriately grateful to them for the “hard vote” they took to let the universities double the statutory tuition increases in order to mitigate some of that cut.
 
Well, O.K., but the point of highlighting how state support for universities has been steadily declining has not been to show up Representative Wallace or anybody else.  It has been to try to show how such underfunding threatens to seriously compromise our students’ education, and to try to make 4-year higher education more of a priority for the state.  And it seems ironic at best to chastise the universities for not crowing about tuition increases in a hearing where everyone is beating on the universities for wanting the authority to raise tuition.  And to call the information about state appropriation cuts “misleading” and declare them a reason to be forever vigilant against university dishonesty and skullduggery is just beyond the pale.
 
Washington’s universities had their state appropriations cut by over $400 million last year, and we’re looking at another $45 million cut this year.  Our total funding (state appropriations and tuition) ranks 48th in the nation.  It’s time to stop talking about how to further regulate and control the best universities in the country and start talking about how to fund them.

So now we’re at that place where what’s Right has to take a back seat to Right Now.

This was budget week in Olympia, the week when 147 legislators hit the home stretch and started really galloping toward the finish line.  Here’s hoping they all make it there.

As expected, both the Senate and House proposed budgets continue to treat Washington’s state universities like ATMs. The Senate followed the Governor in mandating a 6% and change cut to university state appropriations on top of the 23% cut to biennial state appropriations enacted last year. The House budget does a little better, keeping the new cut to around 4%. Both proposals continue the ten-year Washington tradition of robbing the Peter of the universities to pay the Paul of the community colleges, thus continuing to privatize 4-year higher education and put Washington’s citizens at a disadvantage in the competition for Washington’s best jobs.  

But, truth be told, most of us in the university business breathed a little sigh of relief on Tuesday when these budgets came out—that’s how low our expectations have fallen. In the weeks leading up to the budget announcements, there had been rumors of the senate proposing to double the governor’s cut. So, given what could have been, if the final slice turns out to be somewhere between the house and senate, we’ll head home to figure out the least damaging way to make college less available for Washingtonians with a little spring in our step. It certainly won’t be the best possible outcome and the state’s long-term neglect of public universities will continue to have long-term consequences, but we’ll live to fight another day.

Right now, everybody needs to take the same approach to the legislature’s attempts to raise new revenues. All three proposed budgets—the governor’s, the house’s, the senate’s—depend on new tax dollars. The governor needs $605 million to get home, the house is looking for $854 million, and the senate wants $918 million in new revenue.  Both the governor and the senate close loopholes and institute some new pollution and venal sin taxes, and the senate calls for a slight and temporary increase to sales tax. As of this writing, the house has said how much but not how—we’re all still waiting for the specifics of the house tax proposal.

None of this is enough none of it does anything to fundamentally reform the meanest tax structure in the country, but it is what we need right now to keep schools reasonably effective, to keep college somewhat accessible, to keep thousands of people from losing their jobs, to keep people from dying.  

Almost from the minute the budgets were released on Tuesday, legislators started getting cold feet. There have been almost continuous caucus meetings in an attempt to get House and Senate Democrats to agree on a package. Nobody has to be reminded that it’s an election year.

So right now, we here at the blog feel compelled to look away for a moment from the world we want and focus on and the world we actually live in. The tax plans on the table now are inadequate in a variety of ways, but our representatives need to hear that they won’t be punished for them in November.  

Go to this link to show them the love...

“The truth is, education reform without tax structure reform is a hollow promise, and we’ll never be able to sustainably fund K-12 and higher education until we move to a fairer and more adequate tax system. Everything else is just talk.”

              --Goldy, from the inimitable horsesass.org

Governor Chris Gregoire talked the talk in front of the Washington State Labor Council on Thursday and her message was clear: the 2010 Supplemental Budget cannot be just another orgy of cuts.  She didn’t come right out and say the word Taxes, but the crowd of labor leaders and state employees certainly heard it that way.  

The halftime show of this year’s battle over cuts versus revenue takes place on Monday on the Capitol steps in Olympia, where the Teabaggers will be going toe to toe with the Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition.  The Teabaggers are scheduled for 10 a.m., with the sane people following at noon.  

The betting line on who will turn out the bigger and louder crowd remains even money, but it’s pretty clear which way the larger wind is blowing.  Say whatever you want about Massachusetts and Centerfold Scott, out here voters in Oregon and Washington have seen the light on new revenues to get us through the economic crisis.  Oregon passed new taxes handily last month and new school levies are winning overwhelmingly in Washington.  All those legislators who worry that a yes vote on taxes will hurt them in the next election might need to start worrying that a no vote will hurt them worse.

It’s not just because we’re lazy, greedy state employees sucking on the public tit that we here at the blog support new revenues.  

Along with the usual and obvious arguments about how many people will die, go broke, lose their jobs, and be denied access to an education if we keep cutting the state budget, there is also a pretty solid argument that new revenues will save and create jobs and boost the economy.  Check out this analysis (pdf) from the Economic Opportunity Institute.

The problem with tax talk is not that we’re talking about raising taxes, but that we’re not going far enough.  The legislators who are voting right now to suspend Tim Eyman’s oligarchical Initiative 960 are not going to go any further than closing loopholes on people who don’t vote for them, taking a bigger bite out of our sugar and drug vices, and maybe some slight new sales taxes.

It remains a moral failing of Washington’s political system (and probably the thing that gives Eyman, Inc. it’s faux populist life) that we remain a state with a low tax base but a very high rate of tax on people least able to pay.  If we were to get religion here at the blog, we would probably think it a sin that poor people in this state get taxed at four times the rate of rich people.  It is a shame that while there will probably be a tax increase in this legislative session, there won’t be tax reform to go with it.       

So come to the rally on Monday and talk the talk to give our representatives the courage to walk the walk.

State Senator Jim Kastama, Democrat from the 25th legislative district and the fine city of Puyallup, has introduced SB 6409, a bill that would shift the Washington State Lottery proceeds currently devoted to the K-12 construction fund to a new “Washington Investment in Excellence” fund, which would fund scholarships, research, and innovation in higher education.  

Compared to states like Georgia and Arkansas, where the lottery seems to be doing a booming business, Washington’s lottery seems to be underperforming:

Senator Kastama feels that this gambling gap is the result of a wrong-headed marketing campaign. Here in Washington, we plug the lottery as a get-rich-quick-scheme:

While in Georgia, they sell the lottery as a way to support education:

Senator Kastama’s argument is that the state is leaving a lot of lottery dollars on the table by refusing to push the lottery as an education fund.  This has been a conscious choice.  State and local school organizations have been reluctant to connect the lottery to K-12 education, for fear that this would lead voters to think that gambling had sufficiently funded K-12 and make them less inclined to vote for school levies and bonds.  Since there are no levies and bonds for colleges, that conflict wouldn’t exist if the lottery proceeds were devoted to higher ed.  

Senator Kastama estimates that shifting the lottery advertising focus away from early retirement and toward sending a kid to college will attract a whole new clientele and expand lottery proceeds by as much as $456 million.  

From our unabashedly university-centric point of view here at the blog, there’s a lot to get excited about in this idea, so let’s pause for a moment to take a larger view.  Right now, lottery revenues (after the prizes have been paid and the overhead covered) go to three things: paying the vig on Safeco Field, the K-12 education construction account, and a program to help gambling addicts.   

Since Mariners’ boss Howard Lincoln is currently a trustee at WWU and it looks like the Mariners are poised for a playoff run this season, we’ll pass for now on the rant about the public subsidizing billionaires and their professional sports hobbies.  Suffice it to say that it is what it is.

The idea of shifting the money away from K-12 to higher makes sense in terms of the marketing argument, but we shouldn’t forget that it moves money from already desperately underfunded schools (unconstitutionally underfunded, as the judge told us last week) to desperately underfunded colleges and universities.  As much as we’re homers for higher ed here at the blog, we don’t want our universities to be funded at the expense of Washington’s children.

The blood money for gambling addicts raises the whole question of why have a lottery at all.  It’s like funding Alcoholics Anonymous with a tax on booze.  It also highlights the fact that the lottery is yet another incredibly regressive tax in a state with the most regressive tax system in the country.   Looking at this situation, any competent ten year old would pretty quickly arrive at the question, If we want to fund education, why not do it with a progressive income tax instead of preying on the desperate hopes of those living in the neglected regions of capital?

But, all that said, let’s reluctantly turn away from the world we hope for and back toward the one we find ourselves living in.  Senator Kastama’s point is that if we’re going to have a lottery, why not encourage more people who can actually afford it to play it by selling it as a tax for higher ed?  That’s not a bad idea.

And, more importantly, Senator Kastama is the only person in Olympia right now arguing for a dedicated fund for higher ed.  And we like that a lot.  As a member of the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development committee, Senator Kastama has shown that he understands the folly of using higher ed as the state’s rainy day fund, and he recognizes how bad it is for Washington that our four-year universities are among the worst funded in the nation.  At a time when both Democrats and Republicans seem indifferent to destroying state universities with further cuts to already decimated budgets, it’s refreshing to have someone at least looking for a different way.

Despite the fact that Washington state politics never ranges beyond the relatively narrow spectrum of the rest of the country--from slightly right of center to a fair bit farther right—Washington politicians will often claim such labels as “liberal” or “progressive.”  And almost all of them can be counted on in the clutch to call themselves “independent.”

But none of them will admit to being a communist.

And yet much of state government’s approach to higher education would make the old architects of Soviet-style planned economies proud.  Whether it’s high demand enrollments, the HEC Board’s Master Plan, workforce training, or degree targets in performance agreements, the state legislature seems much more concerned with training and managing the workforce than educating the citizenry.  The state senate committee on higher education is even called “Higher Education and Workforce Development.”

It is almost impossible to have a conversation about higher education in Olympia without it quickly turning to questions of training, utility and function. We need this many engineers, that many nurses, more people in STEM fields.   Institutions of higher education are understood as little more than the handmaidens of businesses, which are like machines that need parts that our colleges and universities are supposed to produce.  “Washington’s postsecondary education and training system,” says Governor Gregoire’s website, “prepares students for the knowledge economy and provides a skilled work force for industries of all types.” 

This is why there has been so much emphasis on “workforce training” in the current budget discussions. The governor’s budget proposal robs the Peter of the universities to pay the Paul of the community colleges in order to create 2500 more “workforce training” slots. Word on the street is that budget writers in the state senate are considering an even larger fund shift toward training.

At this point in a discussion like this, you would understandably expect the frothy English professor to start waxing indignant about the humanity, self-fulfillment, peace, love, and harmony that come with a university liberal arts education.  But here at the blog we’ve been trolling the hallways of state government long enough to no longer care much about the inherent virtues of reading Rousseau or boogying to Beethoven.  

What we care about are barriers to opportunity for the middle and working classes.  

When President Obama or Jill Biden or Governor Gregoire or the Seattle Times or state legislators who write budgets talk about the “workforce” and how and for what they should be trained, they’re talking about somebody other than them and theirs.  What we have here are people from the winning side of the have/have not line prescribing limits for those on the other side.  As long as state government continues to write budgets that define 2-year higher education as a public good and 4-year higher education as a private good, it will continue to look more like the Politburo serving a planned economy than a democratically elected set of institutions that are supposed to foster dreams and social mobility.

Education and training at every level are important.  But funding choices, consciously or not, are ensuring that those born into the “workforce” are destined to stay there.

From each according to their ability, to each according to their economic class.

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Our new favorite Republican here at the blog is Larry Haler. Representative Haler hails from Richland and has been sent to Olympia by the fine people in Washington’s 8th legislative district. 

He also seems to be one of the few legislators who really gets it about the destruction of our state universities.  

Representative Haler is a member of the House Higher Education Committee, and he has recently made a point of regularly reminding his colleagues that state appropriations to 4-year higher education were cut 26% last year and that Washington ranks 48th in the nation in both 4-year university participation and 4-year university funding per student.  He understands that the additional $46 million in cuts in Governor Gregoire’s  supplemental budget proposal will devastate our universities, making them significantly smaller and exponentially more private.  

Representative Haler’s insight was again on display last week as the House Higher Ed committee heard testimony on House Bill 2655 (pdf).  HB 2655 is the brainchild of the Higher Education Coordinating Board and it is being peddled by members of the HEC Board as the product of last summer’s System Design Study. 

Faithful readers of the blog will recall that the System Design Study was assigned to the HEC Board after last year’s grueling legislative session.  It was supposed to put an end to the perennial parade of pork bills calling for the state to build a brand spanking new university in Everett or Marysville or various other places with ambitious legislators.  In the wake of last year’s budget free fall, the legislature asked the HEC Board to come up with a coherent and methodical plan for expanding higher education that would be responsive to state goals and needs rather than political arm wrestling.  

The result, of course, was that the political hurly burly moved to the HEC Board.  The System Design Committee meetings revealed and crystallized a variety of tensions, especially those between the community colleges and the state universities.  A repressed, confrontation-averse academic food fight ensued.  But, under the steady hand of HEC Board Executive Director Ann Daley, the committee eventually produced a relatively sane report.  Check it out here (pdf).  The report calls for expansion upon proven demand, it pays attention to all sectors of higher ed (research universities, regional comprehensives, branch campuses, university centers, community and technical colleges), and it highlights the needs of underrepresented students.  From the totally objective point of view of us here at the blog, the report is still biased toward community and technical colleges (let’s face it, those folks are just better organized and more persistent than we are), but overall it’s a decent and useful report.

Unfortunately, something seems to have happened on the way to the capitol.  HB 2655 calls itself “An act relating to expanding the higher education system upon  proven demand” and purports to represent the System Design Plan, but it might more accurately be called “An Act to Try to Produce More Baccalaureate Degrees Without Actually Paying For Them By Allowing Community Colleges to Run Amuck.”  Despite the fact that the System Design Report included all sectors of higher education, HB2655 focuses almost exclusively on 2-year colleges.  It specifically removes a statutory prohibition on community colleges becoming 4-year liberal arts colleges and provides a road map for “mission change.”  

Turning a community college or two into a four-year school is not, theoretically, a bad idea, but such transformation should be pursued only after our current state universities have been adequately funded.  Representative Haler understood this when he called HB 2655 “the wrong bill at the wrong time,” and went on to remind his colleagues that Washington ranks 48th in the nation in funding for our state universities.  

Perhaps the most telling moment in the hearing came when Representative Scott White (probably the most engaged, intelligent, and passionate supporter of state universities in the legislature) questioned Bellevue Community College President Jean Floten about the tension between the resources required to offer legitimate 4-year degrees and the claims that community colleges are more cost effective at producing bachelors degrees.  With the pride in exploitation that only a boss can bring, President Floten announced that the applied baccalaureates at Bellevue were getting most of their momentum from faculty who were “volunteering” their time.  

There you have it folks: the grand plan for producing more bachelors degrees in Washington State is to make faculty work for free.

House Ways and Means Committee, January 13, 2010

Work Session: Presentation of the Governor's 2010 supplemental operating budget proposal. For the entire hearing, visit this link.

Mike Reilly...

Bill Lyne...

Sherry Burke...

Marsh Riddle-Buly...

So the 2010 Washington State legislative session is a week old and already the writing is on the wall for our state universities.  Governor Gregoire summed it up in her state of the state address:

“Our higher education system is a major economic engine for our recovery.



We need to keep the doors to higher education open to students of all income levels by restoring funding for the State Need Grant Program. 

We owe it to all those, like Janel, who couldn’t attend college without our help.



I’m asking you to provide funding to our community and technical colleges to retrain 2,500 of our workers for the jobs of tomorrow.


And I’m requesting you provide our four-year institutions with competitive tuition flexibility so we can continue to be ranked among the best in the nation in producing the most innovative workers and employers.”


To translate and sum up, the governor wants to restore the cuts to financial aid that she made in her “Book 1” budget, she wants to further shift the balance of higher education funding to the community and technical colleges, and she wants to give tuition setting authority (“flexibility” isn’t fooling anyone) to the universities and call it good.  You’ll notice that there’s money there for everything except the state universities.  

The restoration of the State Need Grant was a no-brainer.  That $146 million gives those below the middle of the middle class some access to higher education and is the foundation of programs like Husky Promise and other university-based financial aid.  There was talk that the governor’s choice to cut the Need Grant in her Book 1 budget was a shock and awe tactic designed to drum up support for new revenues.  That talk was loud enough that Governor Gregoire felt compelled to vigorously refute it in her various public comments this week, saying that she was simply meeting her obligation to present an all-cuts budget and not trying to scare people into new taxes.  

Certainly there is a lot of evidence to suggest that she was absolutely sincere in saying that.  The guv’s Book 2 budget calls for almost $800 million in new revenue, but it’s very coy about where that money will come from.  In her remarks in various legislative hearings, Governor Gregoire spoke confidently about conversations with her new pal Vice President Biden and the promise of up to a billion dollars in new federal stimulus money.  It’s hard to imagine that a careful politician like Governor Gregoire would raise our hopes like that if she wasn’t pretty damn sure she could deliver.   

And that’s good news and bad news.  

These days any money is good money, even the kind with the treasury printing press ink still drying. But, as our Republican friends are fond of pointing out, getting hooked on fed cash in 2010 can make the withdrawal that much harder in 2012.  

So the bad news is that the VP’s stimulus promises have led our Eymann/Rossi haunted governor to back way off from the taxes she was talking about just a few weeks ago.  And in an election year when Democrats are poised to take a backlash beating, no one’s stepping up to take her place.  So right now it looks like the best we’re going to do is a couple of closed loopholes and maybe a bite on gum.

And that’s too bad, because at a time when everyone’s running around talking about the opportunities in this crisis and the need for fundamental reform, it seems like the least we could do is overhaul the most antiquated and regressive tax structure in the country.  Even if it didn’t net the state one more dime of new revenue, it’s way past time for the legislature to change a system that taxes poor people at a rate of about 17% and rich people at a rate of about 3%.

But we digress . . .

Back at the state o’ the state, right after restoring financial aid, the governor called for more money for worker retraining in community and technical colleges.  This is not a change from the Book 1 budget.  On its face, worker retraining is a laudable goal, but let’s be clear—the governor’s proposal does not add money to the community and technical colleges, it just makes the cut to the universities deeper in order to mitigate the cut to the CTCs.  Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it: Federal rules for the first stimulus check limit the higher education budget cut to $78 million.  But if you “add” $11.5 million to the CTCs, you can then cut higher ed by $89.5 million.  Divide that evenly between the CTCs and the universities and you can give the false impression that the two sectors were cut equally.  If you wanted to avoid all the unnecessary arithmetic, you could get to the same place by simply cutting the universities $46 million and the CTCs $32 million.  Of course, then you wouldn’t be able to claim that the cuts are equal.  

Funding community colleges is, of course not a bad thing.  But here at the blog, we feel compelled to continue to look at higher ed funding decisions and ask whether anyone in this state gives a shit about having a legitimate 4-year university system.  As always, the numbers make it hard to answer that question with anything but a resounding No:

--Washington ranks 5th in Community College participation and 48th in 4-year college participation

--Washington ranks second in the country in percentage of the higher education budget devoted to community colleges

--Washington is in the bottom five in the country in total per student and total per degree funding for 4-year colleges

--In the last 10 years, state funding for higher education overall has grown by 17%, state funding for community and technical colleges has grown by 28%, and state funding for public 4-year colleges has declined by 7.3%.

--Last year, state funding for public four-year universities was cut by 23%, while state funding for community and technical colleges was cut by 5%.

Public four-year higher education has fallen so far down the budget ladder that the governor and legislators can make tuition-setting authority the big prize for universities and act like they’re really doing something.  Tuition authority will give the universities a little bit better ability to plan and manage, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  The university boards of regents and trustees aren’t going to raise tuition any higher or more rapidly than the legislature has over the last 20 years.  Tuition authority coupled with more cuts to state appropriations will only continue the current downward spiral.  

From the day she released her Book 1 budget, the governor made it clear that she had no intention of using any new revenues to buy back the cuts to university state appropriations.  Politically, she’s on pretty safe ground, as no one other than representatives of the universities has really complained.  A pretty safe bet right now is that at the end of this legislative session, our state universities will be cut another $46 million (on top of the over $400 million we were cut last year) and their boards of regents and trustees will have tuition setting authority.  

This result will only keep Washington’s universities on the road to becoming smaller and more private.