Now that the “special” session is over I’ve been motivated to write a newsletter that answers many of the questions I’ve received in email. If you want to print it click here for the PDF version that’s better formatted for your printer (or at least for mine.)
As always, it’s an honor and a privilege to serve you in the Legislature. This will be my tenth year, which I find astounding. I never intended to do this – I thought I’d swoop in and fix school funding, then go back to the private sector. It turns out that some problems are harder to fix than you would think. The “great recession” is also making it a little more difficult…
Gov. Gregoire called the Legislature into special session Nov. 28 to deal with a significant decline in our expected revenue over the remainder of the two-year budget period, which ends June 30, 2013. She released her proposed revised budget Nov. 21.
We finished the special session on December 14th with the passage of a “down payment” bill on the budget, along with a handful of bills that were related to the budget or to creating jobs in Washington. The down payment bill saved a little less than 25% of the overall problem: $480 million. We still have about $1.5 billion to go.