On the brink of a state budget trainwreck caused by a weeks-long shutdown of Washington’s economy, legislators are bracing to return to Olympia for a special session sometime this year, followed by a bruising regular session in January.
Somehow they’ll have to plug a revenue hole that could reach $5 billion, or around 10 percent of the next two-year operating budget, according to early guesswork. It will require long hours, expert number-crunching, clear-eyed leadership and extraordinary bipartisan give and take.
What mustn’t be accepted, however, are corner cutting, eleventh-hour backroom deals and covert manipulation of the legislative process.
Lawmakers have employed such tactics even when flush with funds from Washington’s red-hot economy. They’ll surely be tempted to use them as tax collections crash during the coronavirus crisis.
But a new court ruling sends a clear warning signal: It’s time to end one of Olympia’s most popular shell games.
For the sake of transparent government, we hope that all current legislators — as well as aspiring officeholders who filed for election this past week — were paying attention. If not, here’s the short course:
A King County Superior Court judge ruled May 8 that a state tax increase on big banks to the tune of $133 million over two years was unconstitutional, calling it “discriminatory in its effects on the specified financial institutions.”
Democratic majority budget writers sneaked through the tax hike in the final hours of the 2019 session. It had no committee hearings, no input from affected banks and no legal analysis by state attorneys. This Editorial Board cried foul, as did other critics.
Lawmakers resorted to a scheme known as a “title-only” bill — a blank document introduced early in the session, when rules of passing legislation are easier, with details left to be filled in until very late.
Title-only bills, aka “ghost” bills, are equal-opportunity gimmicks used by whichever party is in power, helpful while racing the clock to pass budgets. They’re a tool of convenience, yes, but a monkey wrench in the gears of open government.
The 2019 bill was fatally flawed because it targeted fewer than two dozen large, out-of-state banks, thus violating the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.
That’s what Judge Marshall Ferguson ruled last week, rendering a no-duh decision that the state will likely appeal — and lose.
Admittedly, big banks don’t make sympathetic characters in any drama, but open-government advocates often don’t get to choose their allies. And next time a title-only bill is rammed through, who’s to say ordinary Washingtonians won’t be the ones paying a price?
Unfortunately, legislators aren’t eager to relinquish this trick they keep in their back pocket. A proposal to prohibit title-only bills was co-sponsored this year by several Pierce County senators. It died without so much as a public hearing.
“It goes back to rebuilding public trust,” Sen. Hans Zeiger, R-Puyallup, told our Editorial Board in December. That’s as true today as it was back then.
Speaking of trust, state lawmakers are still recovering from another cloak-and-dagger fiasco, when they quietly tried to exempt themselves from Washington’s Public Records Act during the 2018 session.
Today they face the unenviable task of getting our pandemic-derailed state budget back on track; financial security that took weeks to come undone may take years to put back together.
Who knows? A tax hike on big banks, handled in a transparent, above-board manner, may be part of the formula.
Last week’s King County court ruling provides a clear lesson going forward: “It highlights the importance of having bills go through the traditional legislative process” and the risk of deals being “rushed at the last minute,” said Sen. Mark Mullett, D-Issaquah.
Mullett, who chairs the Senate Financial Institutions, Economic Development and Trade Committee, participated in an online state budget forum Tuesday, hosted by the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce.
Last year he was one of five lawmakers who asked Gov. Jay Inslee to veto the bank-tax bill — a wise but unsuccessful plea.
Today, open government in Washington, like so much of our public life, is stuck in an uneasy limbo. Inslee issued an emergency proclamation suspending Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act and Public Records Act.
Traditional in-person government meetings have stopped, and the public can’t physically inspect or copy records. In the first two months of the COVID-19 shutdown, officials were also relieved from responding to record requests within five business days, but as of this week, that deadline is back in place for requests filed electronically.
While some temporary restrictions are reasonable, public officials had better not get comfortable with them.
State and local governments’ inevitable tax-increase and spending-cut decisions won’t go unwatched. And elected leaders won’t be allowed to reach into their bag of procedural tricks unchallenged.
