What's in the WA state Senate Democrats' budget proposal?

There is just one month left in the 2023 Washington state legislative session and a lot to get done in that time. It's a budget year, too. So, while lawmakers are deciding on new laws, conversation about how to use the budget is also ramping up.

KUOW's Olympia correspondent Jeanie Lindsay spoke to Paige Browning on Morning Edition.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Paige Browning: Washington state goes through this budgeting process every two years. There's a lot of money on the table but also a lot of proposals. How do the numbers look?

Jeanie Lindsay: So, the good news is that there's still growth expected in terms of state revenue over the next two years. The bad news is that it will just be slower than expected, with officials predicting about $480 million less than they did in November. But the state is still expecting more than about $65 billion in revenue. And that's not counting the carbon emissions auction dollars that raked in about $300 million in the first auction in February; those auctions are going to happen at regular intervals, which could mean a good chunk of change for the state — more than $1 billion over the next two years.

But the state's revenue can still change, right? Because there is one big moving piece that we haven't talked about yet, which is the state's capital gains tax.

Yeah, actually, on Friday morning, the court issued an opinion upholding the capital gains tax. The court was asked to expedite its opinion, because right now the state is planning to collect that tax on tax day next month and included the tax revenue, which is expected to be about $500 million a year, in the revenue forecast. Also, the Senate included that in its proposed budget released last week. So, with the court upholding it, that means that that funding will be collected, and the state will be able to use that in the state's next two-year budget.

There's about a month left in the session, a month to negotiate the budget. We got a first look at a draft from state Senate Democrats last week. What are they wanting to fund?

The operating budget that Senate lawmakers released includes about $5 billion in new spending, and almost $3 billion of that would be for education, for things like teacher salaries, special education funding. There's also a lot of money targeted at housing and behavioral health. There's also a good chunk for child care and environmental needs, you know, carbon reduction and other sort of environmental projects. There are also dollars to continue addressing the fallout from the state Supreme Court's Blake decision striking down the state's drug possession laws and the fallout from that, but then also funding some of the proposals to address addiction and addiction treatment.

The dollar amounts definitely will change, but you can kind of see what their priorities are.

That's what the Senate Democrats want. This week, we'll see a draft from the House. What will you be looking for?

Democrat leadership has said that the two chambers, the House and the Senate, are really aligned on their values and what their priorities are. But I'm going to be curious to see what those dollar amounts really break down to look like and then how much money goes into each of these different buckets. If there are, you know, drastically different takes on, say, higher education or how much they want to spend on housing. So, we don't know exactly what that will look like. But on Monday we will, so, you know, listen to KUOW to get the latest.