House Republicans have called for state lawmakers to pass a separate K-12 budget that would fund schools before the rest of the operating budget. They will discuss details of that plan, as well as a proposed K-12 education budget, in a news conference Thursday at noon.

The House Education Appropriations and Oversight Committee held a public hearing on Tuesday on the bill that would require the Legislature to pass a separate K-12 education budget. You can read a full Q & A with the bill’s prime sponsor Rep. Bruce Dammeier about education funding on our blog.

Tags: education, K-12, Republicans

We’ve got today’s headlines, from bills to change minimum wage law to education funding reform.

Tags: athletics, education, Higher Education, K-12, minimum wage

The Senate Higher Education committee is considering a bill now to prohibit any state money from being used for intercollegiate athletics. Watch live now.

Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, the bill’s sponsor, said it needs to be stated clearly in the law. She said currently, there’s no assurance to citizens that state money isn’t going to pay football coach salaries, for example. “This is going to give us the force of law to back up our statements to our constituents that we aren’t using tax dollars for these very high paid coaches,” she said. “We haven’t hardly the money to fund our schools properly,” she said, “people get confused.”

Bill Moos, athletic director at WSU, said he’s in favor of the ban. “When I arrived at Washington State in my present capacity, it was very obvious … that a great deal of work needed to be done” to get WSU up to a competitive level. He said each item he wanted to address had a price tag attached. At the same time, the Pac-10 was considering adding teams. He said he took that as an opportunity to renegotiate revenue-sharing agreements within the division.

Sen. Michael Baumgartner asked about the pension obligations to the state when high-paid coaches retire. Coaches are state employees and do receive retirement packages but “there are ceilings on that and I don’t have the exact number on that,” Moos said.

Margaret Shepherd, who lobbies for the University of Washington, said this bill puts into law what is already practice at UW. “The UW athletic department is not just self-sustaining but it’s also a net contributor back to the university,” she said. She answered Baumgartner’s earlier question: UW athletics is completely covered by athletic department revenues and no state tax dollars are used, she said.

Today, the House Education Appropriations & Oversight committee heard a bipartisan bill that would require the legislature to fund K-12 education first and separate from other portions of the budget. My story on the hearing will air on TVW tonight at 6:30 p.m. Today, I spoke with the bill’s prime sponsor, Rep. Bruce Dammeier about education funding and teacher evaluation reform.

Q: How did the idea for House Bill 2533 develop?

The concept has been around this body for I think about four or five years. But the impetus for me to be involved and to move it forward aggressively and in a bipartisan fashion was the McCleary lawsuit. When they say you’re failing in your paramount duty, you better be willing to do something different.

Q: It’s apparent that you have significant bipartisan support from the House. How has the response been in the Senate?

It has been primarily a House idea to this point. We have started some discussions with the Senate but I would say we haven’t gone too far with it yet. I’ve met with my counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Litzow, and we started having discussions around the concept.

Q: Some people at the hearing said they are concerned that the bill could widen the disconnect between early learning, higher education, and K-12. What is your response to that concern?

I would absolutely disagree. Let’s start on the early learning side. As I talked about, there’s certainly a connection on each side. On the early learning side, particularly with the expansion of the WA Kids assessment, our connection with preschool and the early interventions is going to be more important than ever, particularly House Bill 2776 focuses our early investments on all day kindergarten and class size reductions in K-3rd grade. So we’re really focusing our resources on getting kids off to a fast start and our relationship with preschool is a part of that. On the other end, one of the key concerns that I’ve heard mentioned several times this session is the amount of remediation that students sometimes require when they go onto higher education, particularly the community colleges. So by strengthening our K-12 system, making sure our kids are properly prepared for career and college when they graduate, I think that actually strengthens our higher ed program as well by reducing the remediation requirements they may have. 

Q: Some lawmakers have argued that funding education first would put social services and the safety net in jeopardy because those would receive funding last. How do you respond?

I would say we’ve just been reminded by the Supreme Court that our paramount duty is to fund schools. That’s constitutional language. When the courts said that the state must amply provide for the education of all Washington’s children as the state’s first and highest priority before any other state programs or operations, I take that seriously. That’s a direct quote from the ruling. I take that seriously. The Constitution demands this. Our forefathers believed in the importance of K-12 education. They knew that it was the foundation and key to a successful democracy and the key to our economic prosperity. So to the people who say ‘Gee, we shouldn’t do that because another program isn’t first,’ the Constitution is very clear and the court has validated that, in no uncertain terms. The other thing, though, is that while there is no question that our K-12 schools are our top priority, it doesn’t say, nor do I believe that they are our only priority. There are other things beyond that that we absolutely as a state must focus on and that are critically important. Public safety, caring for our most vulnerable, which includes our seniors, our children, our disabled. For me, it’s absolutely essential that we also do those things. At some point, in our prioritized approach, we need to consider whether something is a priority to the state or not, but just because you start with your top priority doesn’t mean other things are not a priority. 

Q: Are there any other bills that you think we should keep an eye on?

Certainly I would say the teacher evaluation bills. I would watch those. They have a very important potential to improve and strengthen the quality of teachers in our classrooms and I believe they can help our adequate teachers become good and our good teachers become great. There’s no question that the number one factor that determines whether a student is successful is the quality of the teacher in the classroom, so we need to focus policies that will make sure we have the best possible teacher in that classroom for every child. 

Washington’s minimum wage rose in January to $9.04, the highest in the nation. The House Labor & Workforce Development Committee on Tuesday heard five bills that sponsor Rep. Cary Condotta says are a way to bring the state’s minimum wage laws more in line with economic reality. The Republican says that in his home district of Wenatchee, he’s seen restaurants fail or lay off employees because of the high minimum wage.

One of the bills would lower the minimum wage for tipped employees to $7.25 an hour, as long as they make up the difference with tips. Another would allow employers to pay a lower “training wage” for up to 680 hours, and a third would suspend the state’s automatic minimum wage hikes during periods when the unemployment rate is 7.5 percent or higher.

Dan Sutton, who owns Cottage Inn Restaurant in Wenatchee, testified in favor of the bills at the public hearing along with a handful of other small business owners. Sutton said he’s had to lay off 25 percent of his staff because of minimum wage hikes. “We pay taxes on tips, we are not allowed to count tips as wages,” Sutton said. “We incur the burden, but we don’t get the benefit.”

Several union and labor representatives spoke against the bills, including Jennifer Fulton, who works as a server at Sea-Tac airport. She said that servers already pay taxes on their tips, and they can’t afford to lose any more money out of their paychecks. “My paycheck is 60 dollars for two weeks of work after I’ve paid out my tip allocations, taxes and medical insurance. I’m literally walking home with 60 dollars,” Fulton said.

You can watch the full hearing here, or catch our 10-minute daily wrap-up of the day’s events tonight at 6:30 p.m. on Legislative Review.

Sen. Ed Murray told The Seattle Times that a bill legalizing same-sex marriage will get a floor vote in the state Senate on Wednesday morning.

The bill was voted out of the Senate Government Operations committee last week with revised language that provides stronger protections for churches and other religious organizations that don’t want to rent out their facilities for same-sex weddings. Twenty-five senators have said they will vote yes on the bill, giving it enough votes to pass.

The House Judiciary committee voted on a companion bill on Monday, passing it along party lines. Bill sponsor Rep. Jamie Pederson told the committee that the Senate bill will likely be used as the vehicle for final passage. No word yet on when the House will vote on the issue.

Tags: gay marriage

Sens. Jim Hargrove and Nick Harper are presenting some ideas for government reform right now to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. You can watch live on TVW.

“We wanted to look at the things that were working, because it certainly didn’t make any sense to cut something that’s working and then try some new, experimental ideas out into the future,” Hargrove said.

First: The state’s violent crime rate is below the national average. “We are doing this with about half as many people in prison per thousand as the national average,” he said, thanks to programs like drug court, juvenile offender rehabilitation and more. And that saves the state about a billion per two-year budget cycle.

Hargrove says they spent the holidays poring over reform ideas. “There was no silver bullet,” he said, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t valuable reforms to be made. He says the Senate Democratic caucus has a list of potential reforms and are working with Senate Republicans on reforms they can all agree on.

Watch the hearing now on TVW.

Tags: government reform, Senate

A bipartisan group of 42 Washington state lawmakers sent a letter to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration asking for marijuana to be reclassified so it can be prescribed as a medicine by doctors and filled in pharmacies. The letter is in support of Gov. Gregoire’s efforts to downgrade marijuana at the federal level to a Schedule II drug, which would put it in the same category as morphine.

Lawmakers say in the letter that the difference in state and federal laws creates a situation “where there is no regulated and safe system” for medical marijuana, and the federal government could “quickly solve the issue” if it were to reclassify the drug. To see the full list of lawmakers who signed the letter, you can read the press release here.

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles also introduced a joint memorial asking the DEA to reclassify medical marijuana. It is scheduled for a hearing in the Health & Long Term Care Committee on Thursday at 1:30 p.m.

Tags: Gov. Gregoire, medical marijuana

Today the Senate Government Operations committee heard a bill aiming to tighten up ethic law in public service. Sen. Mike Carrell introduced this legislation in response to a case last year of an ethics claim against a Department of Corrections administrator who worked on behalf of nonprofit groups on state time.

The Department of Corrections investigated reports that Belinda Stewart, the communications and outreach coordinator for the department, was using state time and resources to do her work with nonprofit organizations. While the state Executive Ethics Board determined that there was “reasonable cause” to believe Stewart violated ethics laws, the DOC concluded that Stewart’s actions were not in the wrong because her work benefited the agency.

“It simply doesn’t matter if somebody is doing things that benefit the department if in fact they’re using state resources, cars, time, employees, to run a nonprofit corporation,” Carrell said at the public hearing.

The bill says that while agencies can help with ethics investigations, they must be overseen by ethics board staff. It also requires that investigators must reveal whether they have a personal conflict of interest with the case. If they do, they can’t continue with the investigation. The bill would also require every state officer to attend an ethics training within a month of being hired, and at least every two years after that point.

Carrell said this bill is aimed at executives — not “line workers” — and said the bill would help fight against favoritism that can occur when ethics complaints against higher-ups are investigated by fellow executives.

The committee took no action on the bill.

The House Judiciary committee is voting on several bills this afternoon, including legislation that would allow same-sex marriage in Washington state. They will also be voting on an adoption bill that would allow adoptees to access their own birth certificates, and a bill supported by Attorney General Rob McKenna that would tighten stalking laws. We will be live with coverage on TVW starting at 1:30 p.m., and we’ll have more on the blog and tonight’s edition of Legislative Review.

Also live on TVW today: At 10 a.m., the Senate Government Ops committee is holding public hearings on bills that would make changes to the state’s Growth Management Act, which was enacted in the early ’90s as a way to limit suburban sprawl. And at 3:30 p.m., the Senate Ways & Means committee is holding a work session on government reform.

Tags: adoption, gay marriage, Growth Management Act, Reform, stalking