Budget Update

We wanted to share that the House released its operating budget yesterday. The fantastic news is that there were no cuts to sexual assault funding! This is remarkable given the dire fiscal landscape. It is a tremendous recognition of the need for quality sexual assault services and the work you all do. Please take a moment to call your Representative on the Ways and Means committee and say thank you for maintaining sexual assault monies. It is important that we reach out and let our representatives know how appreciative we are and how the monies will help to continue to support prevention and sexual assault response in your community.

Without doubt, these are unprecedented fiscal times in our state - we face a $5.1 billion deficit. As one of the means to address the shortfall the House operational budget made $4.4 billion in reductions. While sexual assault programming didn't see cuts  there were cuts  made to other victim services.

•    Reducing Crime Victim Service Centers by 12%
•    Administration at OCVA reduced 12%
•    Reducing Victim Witness Assistance by 10%
•    Reducing Crime Victims Compensation by $1.56 million (assuming passage of SB 5691) by eliminating certain disability benefits
•     Reducing the Department of Corrections budget by $112 million, including by reducing sentances for certain offenders by 120 days ($26 million in savings)   
•     Reducing the DSHS/ Childrens’ Administration budget by $66 million, including $16.6 reductions in regional staffing and $90K in Child Advocacy Center funding
•    Elimination of the Sex Offender Policy Board and the Sentencing Guidelines Commission policy functions  
•    Transfer data functions from the Sentencing Guidelines Commission to the Department of Corrections

Here is a brief video recap of the house operational budget discussion.

The Senate still has to release their budget. It is expected to be out later this month and is the goal of the legislature to have an agreed upon budget by the end of April.

We will continue to keep you apprised of happenings on the hill. Please do take a moment to contact your legislators- it is very important that as a movement we reach out to legislators and let them know that we appreciate their maintenance of sexual assault monies and their support of sexual assault victims.

A list of phone numbers can be found here:

Representative Contact Information

If you don’t know who your Representative is, please don’t hesitate to contact WCSAP and we will help you locate your Representative.  Making this quick call is very simple and is important.

Thanks in advance for contacting your Representative.