Thursday Q&A: Reps. DeBolt and Kessler on taxes, budget and parolees

For this week’s Q&A, I took advantage of Committee Days (which you can watch live on TVW today) and interviewed two leaders in the House. First up, Rep. Richard DeBolt, leader of the Republican caucus. Then: Rep. Lynn Kessler, Majority leader in the House. The interviews are below in the order in which they were conducted, as usual.

Rep. Richard DeBolt:
Q: There’s an estimated $2.6 billion less in the state biennial budget. What are your specific ideas for dealing with this?
DeBolt: We had a lot of specific ideas on how not to get here. We’ve been talking to people for a couple years about reducing the budget. It’s important to understand that this is a choice made that (majority Democrats) knew this was going to happen and they knew they were going to create this bow wave. We talked to them about creating a sustainable budget and at that point we brought solutions to the table and they weren’t taken.
We’re going to go back in, we’re looking at the budget right now, and some hard decisions have to be made. We’ll be a part of the process if the Democrats like.

Q: Yesterday, Gov. Chris Gregoire told TVW that she doesn’t think the $2.6 billion can be made in cuts alone, nor does she think it can be made up in taxes. Instead, she thinks a combination approach is necessary. Agree, disagree?
DeBolt: I think there’s a lot of opportunity that we can take to create revenue for the state of Washington by putting people back to work. (House Republicans) have a plan that we believe we can implement very quickly to bring new jobs to Washington state. And the plan’s called “Made in Washington.” We’re going to meet with the governor very soon. In fact, we’re meeting with her today to see what she thinks.
By creating jobs, you’d raise revenue, lower the burden on caseload and increase taxes through the increased revenue. That is, I think, something we need to focus on.

Q: Can you give me any more information about what’s in the plan?
DeBolt: We’d like to talk to the Governor about it first.
Our goal this year is not to be partisan. We want to be bipartisan. We want that opportunity to meet with the governor and have her take a look at it.

Q: What can government do, if anything, to ensure this type of financial catastrophe doesn’t happen again?
DeBolt: Spend within your means. Not grow government at a 33 percent growth increase, and look at what you can do to actually create wealth in this state and not create poverty. And by that, I mean focus on what we can do to create jobs in Washington state and put Washington back to work again.
We have an increase in revenue. In 1997 we had $18 billion budget. Now we have a $34 billion budget. The revenue has grown over the years.

Q: Yesterday, Gov. Gregoire also said Washington will no longer accept parolees from Arkansas.
DeBolt: Good. I think whatever leadership she wants to provide to make the state safer, we are supporting.

Q: On that note, with budget cuts of $2.6 billion on top of last year’s cuts, I think people are concerned about cuts to public safety, and whether it will mean fewer dollars going to monitoring criminals. Can you address that?
We’ve seen it in the past when Democrats have written budget cuts, they’ve gone to public safety. I don’t think it has to be done that way. Public safety and education are the most vulnerable areas that cuts can come from.

Q: Anything else you want to talk about?
DeBolt: We sent some very bad messages to the citizens of Washington state last year. I want to be realistic and transparent: It’s going to take all of us solving the problem.
This economic crisis for Washington state is not over. We have a budget problem that’s going to be, considering what we’ve had in the past, astronomical. Up to $6 billion in the next biennium. That’s huge.
Our mantra this year is, It’s amazing what you get done when you don’t care who gets the credit. We’re going to put as many good ideas on the table as we can this year and see what we can do to get them done.

And now, for Rep. Lynn Kessler:

Q: There’s an estimated $2.6 billion less in the state biennial budget. What are your specific ideas for dealing with this?
Kessler: First of all, we’re going to fund our core services. That goes without saying, that’s what we’re going to do and make sure that we protect our most vulnerable populations. We don’t want to make our next biennium worse. And we don’t want to have cuts that will have negative long-term effects. That’s sort of our guiding principle.
Having said that, we were briefed today on the budget. About 70 percent, we can’t really do much with. So basically we’re looking at services we provide that are more discretionary that can be suspended for a couple of years or maybe as long as this crisis lasts. And its’ going to be tough and it’s going to be deep.
But we haven’t chosen the programs. We are going to look at efficiencies. We have our work cut out for us. The Appropriations chair and the Ways and Means chair are prepared to give specifics but I am not. Needless to say there are going to be some very deep and painful cuts, but we do have guiding principles. We’re not going to throw disabled people under the bus

Q: Yesterday, Gov. Chris Gregoire told TVW that she doesn’t think the $2.6 billion can be made in cuts alone, nor does she think it can be made up in taxes. Instead, she thinks a combination approach is necessary. Agree, disagree?
Kessler: Totally agree. We have to keep in mind, last year we were facing a $9 billion shortfall. We were fortunate to have one-time federal money to help, so we cut about $4 billion of real services. This cut is for approximately a year. So the $2.6 billion is really worse than what we faced last session. We have to take those cuts in a year instead of over two years. The pain is a lot harder because it’s a shorter time frame.
We are planning to get out some early cuts and so that we’ll get some things rolling so that we can get going early on. We want to be more thoughtful than just throwing out a bunch of things early on. We’re going to, as I say, we’re going to get a balanced budget and there will have to be some revenue I am sure and we hope to have a variety of ways to reach that goal. But until we size the cuts that we can take that aren’t cutting into our basic core services or not protecting our vulnerable populations, we can’t say, ‘We need X dollars’ (in taxes).
If we did an all-cuts budget, people will kind of go, ‘Whoa. That’s really, really tough.’ I think we saw the public, in voting down I-1033, that they knew that actually real people were being impacted by this international and national economic crisis. We care more for our people than just saying, ‘Oh well, too bad.’

Q: What can government do, if anything, to ensure this type of financial catastrophe doesn’t happen again?
Kessler: We should call Wall Street and mortgage lenders and the banking industry to see if there’s anything they can do. We’re responding to their irresponsibility, their greed, their graft, their fraud. It seems they took advantage of the people who couldn’t afford it, and in a lot of cases by lending money to people to buy houses they couldn’t afford. They scooped up the money and then sold it off as toxic assets and then we’re paying that price and we can’t take responsibility for that.
Even Dubai — the God-awful place of earth with man-made palm tree islands — is having trouble. So we didn’t cause this, but we’re certainly going to respond to it in a compassionate and responsible way and we hope Congress puts up those firewalls that we used to have so this won’t happen again.
If we had saved $12 billion to deal with this, where would our education system be?

Q: Are you saying that to save up enough to avoid the shortfall, programs like education would have been harmed in previous years?
For years. We had already gone through a recession after 9/11. We had to make immediate cuts because people quit spending. So, this was nothing that anybody could have foreseen except the people that brought us to our knees. It was a house of cards.

Q: Yesterday, Gov. Gregoire also said Washington will no longer accept parolees from Arkansas.
Kessler: After hearing that they had issued a warrant for his arrest and then withdrew, then sent another non-enforceable warrant, I can see why (Gov. Gregoire) had the reaction she had. This man was determined to be a habitual criminal and because Gov. Huckabee decided to let him go because he’s young, he ended up here.
Rep. Chris Hurst is going to get to the bottom of all of this in a hearing in January. We’ll hopefully get some answers. I think the governor’s response is appropriate, I don’t know if we can do it, but we can’t be accepting people’s habitual dangerous criminals and then get stuck. He should have been locked up for 105 years.

Q: On that note, with budget cuts of $2.6 billion on top of last year’s cuts, I think people are concerned about cuts to public safety, and whether it will mean fewer dollars going to monitoring criminals. Can you address that?
Kessler: First of all, this guy had a monitoring device on his ankle and he removed it. Why didn’t anybody respond to that. Having said that, all of the people that we have been letting out or they get out a month early or something, these are not dangerous violent criminals. They’re maybe in for marijuana possession, not that that’s good. But we are not jeopardizing public safety.