When Gov. Inslee announced new restrictions on business and other activities yesterday, he also said that the state will provide some additional relief for businesses:

To help mitigate financial impacts on businesses and their employees, the state will commit $50 million in aid. In the short term, the state is commuting $20 million be dedicated to cash assistance targeted directly to hardest hit industries. Remaining funds will be focused on supporting recovery efforts through business loans. Additional details are forthcoming.

Crosscut reports, “Inslee said he didn’t have plans at this time to call an emergency session of the Legislature, noting that some forms of business relief can be provided without passing new legislation.” Indeed, the state has $372.7 million left of its share of federal Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF) dollars. Those funds could be used for this purpose. (The state previously allocated $20 million of CRF funds to small businesses, and many local governments have allocated parts of their shares to businesses.)

Using the CRF seems likely. As the Seattle Times reports, “Inslee said the state has an additional $50 million in federal money to mitigate impacts on businesses and workers and will distribute it, likely through grants and loans, by the end of the year.”

Paul Roberts of the Times adds,

But that’s a relatively modest relief package, especially compared with several federal pandemic-relief programs, which brought the state more than $12 billion in forgivable small-business loans and more than $6.4 billion in enhanced unemployment benefits before they expired. . . .

Inslee also said the state was looking into other ways to help workers and employers — and also hinted that the state was considering ways to use state funds to replace those expired federal relief programs.

But Inslee offered few specifics on how the state would fund that replacement relief and acknowledged that the state “would have to be very creative on how to finance it [given that] we already have a billion-dollar hole in our budget.”

As I noted last month, with the September revenue forecast, the estimated budget shortfall is about $1.240 billion over four years, assuming the rainy day fund is tapped. However, that figure does not take into account any of the savings measures undertaken by the governor, the increased federal match for Medicaid, or changes to the caseload forecast. With the most recent publicly-available information, I estimate that there may not even be a hole, let alone a billion-dollar one.

Of course, the November revenue forecast, which will be adopted on Wednesday, could change the budget outlook significantly. The new restrictions on economic activity will not help the forecast.

Opportunity Washington has more here.