March 6, 2008
News from Legislature: Few gains but few losses, Hodgins says
The best news coming from the current legislative session, set to end March 13, may be no news at all, according to Director of State Relations Randy Hodgins.
True, Hodgins said, it appears unlikely that major UW requests are going to receive favorable action. But, it is also true, he added, that the gains from the previous session are likely to remain intact. Things could be worse: higher education in Arizona and California is being threatened with double-digit budget cuts, due to declines in those states’ economies.
Both houses have passed their own versions of the supplemental budget, and those budgets are quite similar when it comes to the UW. The so-called “safe campus initiative,” which would have funded improvements for universities and colleges to deal with emergencies, was not funded in either house, save for a provision that would permit hiring of a single mental health counselor at each four-year institution.
“The governor is very disappointed, but from the very beginning there was very little interest in this program among legislators,” Hodgins said.
The UW e-science initiative was not funded in the House budget but was funded at half of the $2 million request in the Senate. Hodgins pointed out that e-science is tied closely to a UW request for managing a major National Science Foundation project, the Ocean Observatories Initiative.
A request for land acquisition and soils remediation at UW Tacoma was funded in part in the budgets of both houses. In other UW-related measures, the Burke Museum is in both budgets for pre-design funding of a major addition, and the Ruckelshaus Center is funded for working on the settlement of two disputed policy matters, statewide land use and hospital staffing ratios for nurses.
The Washington Student Lobby has secured money in the House budget for child care, to be distributed by the Higher Education Coordinating Board, which would match student fees allocated for this purpose.
But other proposals for additional operating funds were largely deferred due to a deteriorating state revenue picture and an increase in mandatory budget expenditures.
The fate of the North Sound campus is dicey at best. “There is a fundamental anxiety among legislators over whether the funding is available to build this campus,” Hodgins said. “There is a large and growing gap between capital funds available to the state and the state’s obligations. This structural problem on the capital side is even more severe than pressure on the operating budget.”
Husky Stadium funding appears to be dead for this session, too.
Hodgins expects the Legislature to adjourn on time. Right now, differences in K-12 funding appear to be the major operating budget issues separating the two houses, along with the governor’s determination that state reserves should not be allowed to dip below $750 million.
