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Tuition Increases?
The Seattle Times wrote an interesting article in this morning’s paper about the budget question facing us about higher education. Both House and Senate proposals do terrible things to the higher education system in Washington. It’s worth the read. We have to decide if we want to allow the universities to raise tuition, or just…
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HB 2343 – National Board Certification Bonus
HB 2343 does a number of ugly things to the K12 system as part of the terrible, devastating budget cuts to education and everything else the state does. One of the proposed changes is to permanently eliminate the inflation adjustment to the bonus we pay to teachers who have achieved National Board Certification. I do…
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Misc. Budget Notes
I’ve answered a lot of mail on the budget so far. Some items come up over and over again – Adult family homes, family planning funding, Children’s Hospital, and the State Auditor and his I-900 audits. Here are some notes on these things. Family Planning There has been about $10 million in the state budget…
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Hobbesian Choices
The chairs of the House and of the Senate budget committees both introduced their budget proposals this week. The committees will vote on them soon, though none of us can say exactly when at this point. Typically the bills are introduced and passed in about 3 days. The minority party always whines that they don’t…
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Updates to Basic Ed Financing
The Senate released their budget yesterday. The House releases its today. I’ll opine later on the differences. Both are mostly no-new-revenue budgets. The Senate packages up closing some tax loopholes. The House comes out later this morning so I can’t comment on it now. Both bodies have passed a version of the Basic Education Finance…
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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…
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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…
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The News Tribune covers Basic Ed plan
Peter Callaghan wrote about our tremendous hearing in the House yesterday. We had 120 people testify, of whom only 13 were opposed. The most amusing juxtaposition was when a panel of 4 superintendents delivered a letter from all 35 school district superintendents in the Puget Sound region endorsing the bill was followed by the director…
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Taxable Retail Sales
Cindi Holmstrom, the Director of the Department of Revenue, sent me this chart and the associated comments last week. It’s a sobering indicator of economic conditions. Taxable retail sales provide a strong indication of the economic conditions in the state of Washington. The chart below illustrates the decline in retail sales tax collection over the…
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Basic education funding task force releases final report to the Legislature
Ed system overhaul would include changes to teacher pay, additional class time  For immediate release – January 14, 2009 The task force that spent nearly two years reviewing Washington’s definition of “basic education†and the funding structure to support it has released its final recommendations for an overhaul of the state’s K-12 funding system.…