First, as part of our 2015-17 budget preview policy brief, we included a chart showing the projected new revenues and spending needs for the biennium. It was based on one from the Office of Financial Management. I’ve updated the chart to reflect new information from OFM:

And now to the links:

1. Contract negotiations with state employees are ongoing. (Friday I mentioned the negotiated salary increases.) Yesterday the Olympian reported that a “Split may be forming in state Federation over adequacy of worker contract agreement.”

Nilsson, who has been part of past negotiating teams for the federation, said the 3 percent pay increase proposed for July 2015 and at least 1.8 percent in July 2016 are not enough and relegate state workers to a status as “second class citizens.” . . .

“I can only say what the bargaining team said in voting to accept the agreement: they recommended ratification,” federation spokesman Tim Welch said. “I think once members see the full summary and the dozens and dozens of improvements they’ll agree.”

2. State employee unions have also negotiated an agreement to keep the employee share of health care insurance premiums (for both individual and family coverage) at 15 percent. This is the same percentage employees have paid since the 2011-13 biennium. As a comparison, private and public sector workers nationally pay 18 percent for individual coverage and 29 percent for family coverage in 2014.

3. Last week I wrote about the fact that universities are refusing to identify budget cuts that would reduce their maintenance level budgets by 15 percent, as requested by Gov. Inslee. Yesterday the Seattle Times ran a story with more on this.

Washington’s public college and university presidents, warning that a hypothetical 15 percent cut to higher education would be devastating to public colleges and universities, are in a standoff with the state Office of Financial Management (OFM) over fiscal planning for the next two years.

Asked to name programs they would cut and put them in order of priority, the state’s six public four-year schools all ignored that exercise — instead describing a scenario of impacts such as lowered enrollments and higher tuition. . . .

“McCleary, in budget-math terms, is like another recession,” [OFM Director David Schumacher] said.

4. From The News Tribune, “State Board of Education: New revenue needed to pay for schools.”

The State Board of Education this month took the unusual step of telling the Legislature that there’s no way the state can fully fund basic education without new revenue.

It’s the first time the nonpartisan state board — which provides policy oversight of the state’s education system — has formally and explicitly weighed in on how lawmakers should come up with the money to comply with a court order to fully fund basic education by 2018. . . .

“I think according to the court’s own words in the McCleary case that basic education should be funded as a first priority, before any other statutory requirements and obligations,” said [Rep.] Magendanz, who is from Issaquah. “If we put together a solution for McCleary that depends on new taxes that could fail on referendum, we’re not doing that.”