The joint legislative task force trying to figure out how to administer, fund, and implement the state's new paid family leave benefit mandate continues to grind along. In its meeting last week, there was a hint of progress: some degree of consensus emerged around using the general fund to pay for the administration and benefits of the program. Brad Shannon for the Olympian covered it here, while the Associated Press reported here.
The combined costs of both are projected at between $75 million and $100 million per biennium. That doesn't include almost $30 million in hardware and programming costs necessary to establish the computer system that would spit out the benefit checks.
The idea of using the general fund beat out several other options such as taxes on liquor, carbonated beverages, candy and gum, and different forms of payroll taxes. The fact that any of these options would entangle legislators in new taxes during an election year was not lost on the task force members.
Yet interestingly, Governor Gregoire is quoted in both news articles as possibly opposing use of the general fund to pay for benefits:
“The governor is open to looking at the general fund on start-up costs, but as for benefits, she is not there yet,’’ Gregoire’s legislative director Marty Brown said.
All this, of course, came the day before the state's chief economist downgraded the state's revenue forecast by $132 million -- just a tad more than the expected start up, computer, administration, and benefit costs of the program in the first biennium.
That fact, in turn, was not lost on the Vancouver Columbian, which editorialized:
The surplus must be used judiciously, not frittered away on half-baked, feel-good campaign fodder such as the paid family leave bill. As we've editorialized before, there's nothing wrong with competitive, private-sector enterprises offering paid family leave to workers, and paying for it.
But state-subsidized paid family leave is wrong on two counts. It diverts public money to many families that don't even need it, and it absolves people of the traditional financial-planning responsibilities that every family has appropriately faced.
This notion, further burdened by supporters' lingering inability to fund it, should be abandoned.
Lots to agree with there. But politics -- the art of the possible -- will likely preclude not only the abandonment of a bad idea but the implementation of a good idea as well: leaving this up to the competitive private sector. In the end, the task force seemed to be saying the general fund would be the only possible means of funding this creature next year and they're probably right.
