Farewell to the Six Year Outlook

Austin Jenkins reports on Crosscut that the state budget office will no longer be publishing a six year budget outlook.

The Office of Financial Management (OFM) has stopped producing six-year budget outlooks. Instead, it's only producing four-year forecasts. These are one page charts that show whether the state is facing a budget surplus or deficit in future years – based on spending and revenues.

Jenkins leads with this:

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire's budget office has robbed Republicans of a key piece of information they use to beat up on the governor.

Maybe. The four year projections already show a $600+ million deficit, extrapolating another two years would probably magnify that. The out-year projections are shaky for a number of reasons. It's tough to predict economic performance four years ahead. And, when the projections show substantial problems, lawmakers will act responsibly to avoid unacceptable deficits.

The governor referred to a shaky projection in her state of the state message.

Just three years ago, when I came to office, Washington was struggling with $2.2 billion shortfall that threatened to halt any progress on needs from education to health care.

It didn't happen. The economy outperformed projections and lawmakers acted during the recession to restrain spending.

Still, the projections provide useful information. Perhaps only budget wonks will miss them. But it's a loss of information that many of us found useful.

UPDATE Rep. Glenn Anderson introduced HB 2932, establishing the state council on fiscal management that would pick up the current responsibilities of the expenditure limit committee and prepare a three-biennium (6-year) outlook for the state budget.