Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Wash Legislature budget gimmicks and bad process and undone business

Just a note on the mess the Wash Legislature left last week. More later.

Budget gimmicks - forcing the public out of the process - big problems still open but no plan to address them...

Generic Freedom Foundation

... Case in point: We haven’t heard a whole lot about the gimmicks included in this year’s budget deal—the raiding of dedicated accounts, the K-12 one day apportionment delay—not to mention billions of dollars in unfunded state liabilities left untouched by lawmakers.

And then there was the utter lack of transparency toward the end of session as lawmakers chose to avoid public hearings on important bills in order to speed up the process and meet the ever approaching midnight deadline.

Lawmakers may have adjourned without a day specified for a future meeting, but they also adjourned without a plan to tackle many of Washington state’s most serious problems—pension debt, post-employment benefits debt, workers’ compensation debt and so on.

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