Ross Hunter

Month: February 2009

  • Education Financing Update

    Education Financing Update

    For the entire 6 years I’ve been in the legislature I’ve worked on school funding. I’ve tried to improve the amount and the efficacy of use of the money. This year a bipartisan group of six legislators introduced a package of reforms coming from the Basic Education Financing Task Force report. I’ve written about it…

  • Local Government Financing Plan

    Final Report of the Washington State Local Governance Study Commission. …the underlying structural problem for King County budgeting is the mismatch between tax base and service costs in the unincorporated areas. The solution to this, which is encouraged by the Growth Management Act, is to ensure that the remaining unincorporated areas within the urban growth…

  • Open Letter to Teachers about HB 1410

    I’ve had a lot of questions from teachers on HB 1410 that seem to indicate some misunderstanding of our intent and I believe a misreading of the bill. 1410 is a serious attempt to address school funding inadequacies and the structural problems that have built up over 30 years since the last major revision.  The…

  • Possible Budget Choices – Criminal Justice Costs

    For the past 15 years we’ve been on a trend of increasing the number of incarcerated people. We now lead the world in the percentage of people in jail. It costs the state an average of about $30,000 per year to put someone in prison, plus all the costs of the courts and police/sheriff. Sometimes…

  • February Revenue Collections Report

    We got more bad news on the economy last week – another $63 million decline in the collections data. This was the month of Dec 10 – Jan 10, a very important period in our retail sales data.  Our total decline for the 2nd quarter of fiscal year 2009 (Oct, Nov and Dec 2008) is…