We’re on the road again today – more on that later – so we’re late to getting to the news that Gov. Chris Gregoire on Thursday called for a 30-day special legislative session to commence Nov. 28.
That would come 11 days after the next quarterly forecast of state tax collections. The most recent one released last week reopened a budget gap on the order of $1.3 billion.
It’s thought the next forecast could widen that, although it was repeatedly stated last week that if forecasters thought it would get worse, they would forecast it now. Then consider that lawmakers will want to leave something in reserve after re-balancing the budget. And that has got people talking about a $2 billion problem.
If handled through spending cuts alone, that $2 billion would have to come from an increasingly narrow portion of the state budget that is available to cut. How big that slice is is open to discussion. This Seattle Times article suggests it could be as large as $8.7 billion. Other estimates have suggested it’s as low as $6 billion.
Either way, higher education is highly vulnerable because its state appropriation falls entirely within that space.