This year we faced a daunting problem: balancing a budget with a precipitous decline in revenue due to the ongoing recession. We made cuts to everything, including healthcare for children, public education, mental health care, and compensation for employees.
As a new budget chairman, I entered the job with a handful of principles:
- Nobody was getting a raise. It’s hard to argue that we should pay anyone more at the same time we are eliminating the kinds of programs we are.
- We were going to fund all of our obligations completely. We can no longer pretend that the economy is going to come roaring back next week, next month, or whenever and we’ll be able to make it up. This includes debt service, pension contributions, and all the other long-term commitments we are responsible for as a state.
- We would be thoughtful about the cuts, trying not to make reductions in places where it would cost us more money in the near future or cause irreparable damage.
Many people have written in about the level of contributions to the LEOFF (Law Enforcement and Fire Fighter) pension plans and the decisions we’re making here, and I wanted to take a moment to clarify our decision path. As they do every two years, the LEOFF board recommended contribution rates into the various plans they cover. The Legislature makes the final decision, as we do on all plans. The end result of this long email is that we funded the pensions at the rate the LEOFF board recommended. For those interested in detail, here’s the sequence of decisions: