The budget crisis in Olympia has drawn legislators into lofty conservation about fundamentals. Certainly, just like every other year—immediate, picayune, and thorny questions about what gets funded and what doesn't get funded are front and center. (And this year—with a $9 billion shortfall—those questions are even more pressing and contentious than they've been in the recent past). But a larger question has found its way into the conversation as well: Is the system—based on a sales tax and strict guidelines about increasing taxes—sustainable or stable. And more to the point, is it fair?

As has been widely reported, the Senate Majority Leader herself, Sen. Lisa Brown (D-3, Spokane)—an economics professor at Gonzaga—has repeatedly questioned the equity of the system this session and has raised the idea of an income tax; a paradigm shift for Washington state.

However, the budget crisis has also sparked another monumental discussion. This one is happening below the radar screen, and isn't likely to begin reshaping policy until next session. It does represent another paradigm shift, though. It's about the transportation budget.

The issue came to my attention last week in a conversation with Sen. Ed Murray (D-43, Capitol Hill) about the $4 to $6 billion 520 project. I asked Sen. Murray where he stood on the issue; I was hoping to bait him into criticizing Speaker Chopp's tunnel option—plus I wanted to hear him try and sell me on his 4-lane option. In short, I was expecting what I usually get from Sen. Murray (the former House transportation chair): Wonky details on transportation projects.

But Murray didn't spend much time calculating ridership or ridiculing ill-conceived off-ramps. Instead, he pulled the camera way back, and complained that the 520 bill didn't have an "integrated funding" plan.

Murray explained: "Integrated funding" is funding that supports both cars and mass transit. And just like Sen. Brown is trying to retool how the state's "unfair" tax system is structured (so that rich people pay an equal share of their income on taxes compared to low and middle-income people), Murray is interested in rethinking how the state funds transportation to make road and transit dollars more evenly distributed.

Consider: The current working transportation budget for 2009-11 puts only 4.4 percent of the $5.9 billion total  into transit. And even if legislators were more-transit friendly, the rules governing transportation funding—Constitutionally, the gas tax cannot be used on transit—would have only permitted them to put about 7.3 percent of the money into transit.

Given that 10 percent of all work trips in the Puget Sound region are transit (and 57 percent of all trips are non-single occupancy vehicle—60 percent in Seattle during morning rush hour); and given that vehicle miles traveled has remained flat in the last few years while transit ridership across the state has spiked by 15 to 20 percent, the fact that transit spending is in a straight jacket doesn't fit our state's changing profile.

Combine these transit  numbers with the new state mandates and goals about reducing global warming (particularly by reducing vehicle miles traveled), and the transit funding equation seems as unsustainable are the general fund.

An April 6 letter, signed by Transportation Choices Coalition, the Sierra Club, the Cascade Bicycle Club, Futurewise, WashPIRG, the Discovery Institute (not kidding), and the Bicycle Alliance of Washington about the proposed transportation budget gets into some specific program issues about what's getting funded and what's not getting funded, but ultimately, the letter—which runs 7 pages—turns into a white paper, echoing the larger questions that are also being asked about the the general budget: Is it sustainable and is it fair?

For example, does the constitutional rule that gas taxes—the main source for the transportation budget— can only go to road construction, make sense?

Flagging the irony that increased transit use lowered gas tax revenue which the legislature dealt with by cutting transit programs, the letter concludes:



If I were to boil the letter down to a sound bite, it'd probably be this: The gas tax isn't bringing in enough money, and we're spending what little we have on the wrong thing.