Oregon Public Broadcasting

More than half of Northwest residents think state government spends too much money on low-priority services. This comes from a new public radio poll of 1,200 Idaho, Oregon and Washington residents. Our poll also found that many people dramatically underestimate what portion of state budgets go toward their priorities of schools, law enforcement, and the social safety net. Lawmakers in Olympia are struggling in an overtime budget-balancing session with what to keep and what to cut. Meanwhile, Oregon has faced down a proportionally similar deficit. Last spring, legislative budget writers in Oregon held a series of meetings around the state to get public input on how to bridge their gap.

Do you believe that Oregon spends too much money on other services that aren’t as important as education, public safety, health care and services to seniors?

At many of those hearings, Democratic Representative Peter Buckley, the chief budget-writer in the House, asked the crowd to stand up in sections as a way of showing the relative size of each slice of the state budget. “There's human services. That's our human services budget. You can go ahead and sit down. And the people in the next two rows, behind those, you can stand up. There's public safety. That's our public safety budget," said Buckley.

Anyone who attended that hearing in Lincoln City got a vivid demonstration about how a vast majority of the state's money goes toward a few major programs. The leftovers are divvied up among a wide range of smaller agencies, like Agriculture, Forestry, and Environmental Quality.

In fact, over 90 percent of Oregon's operating budget goes to things that our poll found Oregonians value the most: public safety, education, and human services. Yet, our poll finds that Oregonians think the state spends just 57 percent of its budget in those areas. It's a similar story in Idaho and Washington. Our poll is collaboration with the Northwest Health Foundation and the polling firm Davis, Hibbitts, and Midghall. Glenn Kuper of the Washington Office of Financial Management wasn't surprised to hear about that perception gap. “I think it's been around for awhile. I think it's hard to understand exactly how much the budget is made up of these basic items like education, public safety and health care," he said.

Kuper said nearly three-quarters of Washington's budget goes to those areas. “That's a pretty significant chunk and it really limits what we're able to do in times when we do have to cut, because those are all areas that are hard to do reductions in," he said.

Even those who think the state government has its priorities in order think there's room for improvement. Robb Sipler is a fly-fishing guide in central Oregon. He was one of a minority in our poll to say his state is headed in the right direction. But he said government can still find ways to make do with less.“You wonder how much fiscal efficiency you'll run into with a bureaucracy, and I don't necessarily think that the government having to try to provide those vital services with fewer resources is necessarily a bad thing in big scheme of thingsm," he said.

Retired banker Ed Parker of Canyonville agrees that government should do more with less. He said he doesn't approve of how lawmakers are spending his tax money. "They just start doing too many things that are not necessary for the people of Oregon and it's gotten to the point where it's making it very expensive for us to live," he said.

Our poll found that people in Oregon, Idaho and Washington are fairly unified in prioritizing education, public safety and human services spending. But remember how we told you earlier that respondents vastly underestimated how much the state spends in those priority areas? Well, if you look at it another way, they're exactly right. There are really two ways of looking at state spending. When we talk about the budget, we usually talk about the spending that state lawmakers decide. But if you take into account the entire pie including federal money and fee-based services, then it's true that just 57 percent of the total goes to the public's top priorities. But Representative Peter Buckley, the chief budget-writer in the House, says lawmakers don't get a say in how most of the extra money is spent. “All the other funds come from specific sources with specific purposes," he said.

Such as federal money for unemployment checks, and gas taxes for roads. Technically those things are part of the overall Oregon budget but lawmakers don't get to choose how it's spent. More information:

• Read the public radio survey summary
• State budget information in Oregon 
• State budget information in Washington 
• State budget information in Idaho