OLYMPIA – Shortly after dawn last Wednesday, as the Senate descended into recriminations about who was reneging on their word and who was being mean to school kids, the chamber’s chief budget writer made an impassioned plea to stick with the deal. In it, truer words never were spoken.

“It’s not the way we do budgets around here,” Sen. Andy Hill, R-Redmond, said of some Senate Democrats refusal to pass a bill that was connected to a budget they’d passed, and without which the spending plan would have a $2 billion hole. A deal with things people don’t like but must vote for anyway “is standard budget practice,” he said.

Up for debate was a bill to suspend a major portion of Initiative 1351, which passed last November and requires the state shrink the number of students in classrooms. Almost from the moment ballots were counted, and certainly since legislators arrived in Olympia in January, many have acknowledged that however popular the concept may be – and make no mistake, it is – the state’s budget couldn’t do all classes from kindergarten through high school on the schedule the initiative requires.

That assumption was so common that reporters regularly asked how lawmakers could craft a spending plan and accompanying legislation that rewrote I-1351 in a way that got a two-thirds majority in a House controlled by Democrats and a Senate controlled by Republicans. The bar is so high that Senate Republicans proposed sending a new initiative to November’s ballot to repeal I-1351, which only required a simple majority, and write a budget as though it would pass.

Dumb move, said House and Senate Democrats. If voters decide to keep I-1351, the Legislature would be faced with a big bill when it returned next January.

When a budget agreement was finally reached on June 27, the 163rd day of a session devoted largely to reaching that agreement, Gov. Jay Inslee held a press conference with legislative leaders and their budget writers to announce a deal and said “the hard compromises that had to be brokered. . . all of those have been made.”

Among the inevitable questions was “what about 1351?” Inslee was as coy as a Southern debutante at her first cotillion in dodging this and almost every request for details: “We’ll have more to say about that in subsequent discussions.”

That discussion happened as the sun was coming up Wednesday, after a full day and night of the Senate being in session. Republicans wanted to pass the bill that made changes to I-1351 and Democrats were refusing to come up with the nine votes needed to get to that two-thirds majority unless the Senate also voted for something they wanted but had been thwarted from getting all session. That was a bill to remove some testing requirements that many considered an unfair barrier to graduation for some good high school students.

That wasn’t part of the deal, Hill, other Republicans, and even a few Democrats said. Some of the Democrats who were balking at making changes to 1351 had already voted for a budget that assumed those changes would be made.

Sen. Jim Hargrove of Hoquiam, the Democrats chief budget negotiator, pulled a much-creased piece of paper from his pocket, which he said were his caucus’s budget priorities that guided him in discussions. Changing the assessment tests isn’t on it, he said.

Not paying for all of 1351 in the budget was part of the deal, Sen. Andy Billig, D-Spokane countered. Voting yes on that particular bill was not.

Several bills aren’t on the list but are implicit in the deal, Hill said. “We know how this works. This isn’t everybody’s first rodeo.”

Therein lies the truth of the situation, and the crux of the problem with the way the Legislature budgets. The two budget committees hold hearings on their initial proposals, which give lobbyists of all stripes a chance to sit in front of panel and plead their case for a minute or two, but real negotiations are conducted in secret. It is the way budgets are done, and last week, possibly undone.

Had those negotiations been open, and the strings attached to the deal been public, no question and probably no sunrise debate.

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