OLYMPIA — Gov. Jay Inslee’s administration sent a blistering letter last week to the chairs of the House and Senate transportation committees, warning that their budget proposals would lead to broken promises and poorly maintained roads.
“The capital project lists look robust, but the practical constraints of delivering the projects and the unrealistic financial plan is a set-up for failure and disappointment,” reads the letter from David Schumacher, director of the state Office of Financial Management, to the transportation leaders: Sens. Marko Liias and Curtis King and Reps. Jake Fey and Andrew Barkis.
The ambitions contained within the two chambers’ proposals cannot be realized, the letter argues, while maintenance work and the State Patrol are both underfunded.
For their parts, the legislative leaders cast the letter as typical budget haggling, the result of differing perspectives that would get worked out as the session winds down.
The Senate and House have passed transportation budget proposals that come in at $12.9 billion and $13.6 billion, respectively. The two sides will now need to bridge their differences before sending a bill to Inslee’s desk.
The massive documents draw heavily from gas tax revenue and federal appropriations, as well as general fund dollars approved last year and new money coming in from the state’s newly established carbon credit auction, among other sources. The Legislature approved a nearly $17 billion, 16-year transportation funding package in 2022 — called Move Ahead Washington — and this is the first biennial transportation budget to include that money.
The proposals allocate billions of dollars toward completing long-promised highway projects, including the 520 corridor, the U.S. 395 North Spokane Corridor project, the Puget Sound Gateway project near Tacoma, a widening of Highway 18, and the I-5 Columbia River bridge into Oregon.
They would each also spend nearly a billion dollars on climate-focused projects, mostly funded through carbon auctions conducted earlier this year, including electrifying the ferry system and setting up infrastructure for electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Lawmakers are eager to push forward as quickly as possible on large capital projects, as inflation and delays have ballooned costs; legislators learned this session, for example, that construction on Highway 167 would be $200 million more expensive than previously thought.
“It’s few and far between, projects that are going to be on time and on or below budget,” said Fey, D-Tacoma, the House Transportation Committee chair.
And the longer it takes to complete projects, the more it will cost the state, said King, R-Yakima, ranking member of the Senate Transportation Committee.
But Inslee and the Office of Financial Management believe their aspirations are unrealistic, due largely to a shortage of skilled workers and contractors.
“We have to face the reality of decreasing revenues, increased costs and constraints on contractor availability,” Inslee said in a news conference Thursday.
In their letter, OFM representatives said the legislators’ approximately $7 billion forecast in capital projects was far more than the more typical $3 billion per biennium. Inslee, by contrast, proposed $5.7 billion in projects. If and when those projects could not be staffed and completed, they would need to be prioritized without legislative approval, the letter states.
Additionally, Inslee’s office contends that the legislative budget proposals do not spend enough on maintenance and, if passed, would mean that the state could not take on any work not already underway.
At the same time, the two budgets reallocate State Patrol dollars that are going unspent due to vacancies in the force, as lawmakers simultaneously consider adding an incentive to hire new recruits and people transferring from other departments.
Inslee, however, said the money ought to be used for more overtime.
Fey said the House crafted its proposed budget with the underlying goal of delivering on promises made years earlier by the state and completing Washington’s major capital projects. While the proposed amount for construction is large, he said it’s a hedge against inevitable and unpredictable delays in the mega-projects on the state’s docket.
“What we did … is we assumed that they would underspend,” he said of WSDOT. “But to halt a project or delay a project, didn’t seem to be quite right.”
Liias framed the letter from OFM as part of a typical deliberative process as the session approaches its end.
“This is a routine letter from OFM that shares their views on our respective budget proposals,” he said. “I had a constructive meeting with the OFM director and look forward to crafting a final budget agreement that tries to address these concerns as much as we can.”
The 2023 legislative session is scheduled to run through April 23.
