King County budget saves some jobs and the fair

The Metropolitan King County Council gave preliminary approval Friday to a 2009 budget that saves 19 sheriff's deputy positions, a public-health clinic and special courts that send drug addicts and people with mental illness to treatment instead of jail.

The budget also keeps alive the 145-year-old King County Fair in Enumclaw, which County Executive Ron Sims had proposed shutting down.

But in order to close a $93 million gap in the general fund, the budget will eliminate as many as 60 other sheriff's deputy and 20 prosecutors positions, close most county offices for 10 days, and fund family-planning clinics and tuberculosis control for less than a full year.

The council, sitting as the Budget Review and Adoption Committee, voted 8-0 in favor of the budget. The full council will take final action Monday.

The crisis in the county's general fund — it will drop to about $646 million next year — is due to declining revenue from sales and property taxes and investments, combined with rising labor and health-insurance costs.

The council tentatively voted earlier this week to raise Metro bus fares by 25 cents Feb. 1 and by another 25 cents Jan. 1, 2010.

The budget, negotiated by a bipartisan team, keeps key elements of Sims' original budget proposal: a 10-day unpaid furlough for most county employees and a "lifeboat" of six months' funding for programs that will be discontinued unless the Legislature gives the county the ability to impose a utility tax in unincorporated areas or more authority to shift funds.

The furlough and closure of county offices will be spread out during the year.

"We believe under the circumstances that we're faced with, this is a humane budget, and it's certainly a responsible one," said the council's budget chair, Larry Phillips, D-Seattle.

Sims supports the budget because it is balanced, it maintains cash reserves and it follows Sims' overall budget strategy, his chief of staff, Kurt Triplett, said Friday.

"People came together and recognized that government itself was at risk," Triplett said. "They put together a budget that preserves it and allows us to form a partnership and go to Olympia together" to ask the Legislature for help, he said.

The budget restores funds Sims proposed to cut by trimming spending elsewhere and giving other programs — some of them required but not funded by the state — only six months of support.

Sims had proposed to give six months of "lifeboat" funding to Mental Health Court, Drug Court, Family Court Services, some sheriff's deputies, courthouse marshals, the Northshore public-health clinic, and a day-reporting program for nonviolent criminals.

The council gave those programs full-year funding and instead put in the lifeboat services the state requires the county to perform but doesn't pay for. The largest of those "unfunded mandates" is $2.3 million to hire attorneys for families when the state seeks to take away parental rights.

Sheriff Sue Rahr said she was "very relieved" that additional funding will keep storefront sheriff's offices open and leave all major-accident detectives on the job. But she said she will lose more than 60 other positions, including detectives investigating domestic violence, property crimes, drugs and vice.

District Court Judge Barbara Linde said the courts are already understaffed, and a plan by the prosecutor to file many felony theft and drug cases as misdemeanors in her court system will add responsibilities equivalent to the workload of one judge.

With deficits of $40 million and $62 million looming in 2010 and 2011, council members and others said service cuts in those years could be drastic. "If we have to go through this next year, it will be cataclysmic," said Superior Court Presiding Judge Bruce Hilyer.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com