No special legislative session

OLYMPIA — Some public schools will get more money than they expected, now that state lawmakers have decided not to hold a special legislative session.

Several bills intended to reduce state spending were left hanging when the Legislature ran out of time on April 26, the last day of its regular session. One of them was a bill that had to be passed in order to cut $60 million from school-levy-equalization funding.

That cut had already been included in the budget passed by lawmakers.

The governor said she now plans to fully fund levy equalization, which provides money to "property-poor" school districts. "Small school districts will be whole when it comes to levy equalization," Gregoire said.

However, a provision that would have increased levy lids and allowed school districts, including Seattle, to collect more money from previously approved property taxes, will not be acted on.

Another bill left unfinished would have saved about $8 million by deporting illegal immigrants from the prison system, and the third would have saved a small amount of money by indirectly shortening prison sentences.

Gregoire and legislative leaders in the state House and Senate decided Thursday not to hold a special session. The lawmakers said they could not reach agreement on which bills to bring up.

"The governor was asking for something that could happen in one day and agreement on what bills would come up and what form they would take. There just wasn't the ability to build that type of consensus in the time frame we were given, which was essentially today," Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, said Thursday.

Brown said there were about a half-dozen bills Senate Democrats wanted to bring up during a special session, including a measure that would loosen some voter-approved mandates for more environmentally friendly power generation. House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, couldn't get it through the House after Pierce and Clark county lawmakers demanded more leeway for their hometown utilities.

"My read was the House did not want to revisit those issues," Brown said.

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said that's true. The power-generation bill in particular "was so toxic to our chamber," she said, noting she supported the measure.

However, Kessler maintained that was not the reason they decided to forgo a special session.

It was more a question of why bring everybody back to take care of a handful of bills, she said. "If that's all we're going to do, why not just wait?" Kessler said.

Gregoire said that at this point, the only reason to reconvene would be if the recession gets worse and state revenues fall faster than projected. In that case, she might have to call a special session to decide what parts of the budget to cut more.

The Legislature recently passed a $35 billion two-year budget that reduced spending by $4 billion. Gregoire said lawmakers would decide during the next legislative session that starts in January how to plug the hole created by not passing the handful of spending-related bills.

A joint statement released by Brown and Chopp tried to downplay the lack of a special session, noting the Legislature did pass a balanced budget and "stepped up to the challenge presented by what is generally considered to be the worst recession in 70 years."

Andrew Garber: 360-236-8266 or argarber@seattletimes.com. Material from The AP is included.