Everyone’s worried about money these days and state legislators are no different.

Representatives from both the 47th and 5th legislative districts, in which Covington and Maple Valley are located respectively, all listed the state budget as their number one priority. But they all have other issues close to their hearts and those of their constituents.

Top issues include education or more specifically the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, economic development, sex offenders, the real estate market, consumer protection, transportation and health care.

Sen. Cheryl Pflug, a Republican who represents the 5th and is a Maple Valley resident, has been worried about the legislature’s spending for some time now, but there’s more urgency this year — experts predict a budget deficit of at least $6 billion.

“The big picture is the budget,” Pflug said. “The first job is to undress the underlying problem. The legislature — and both parties have done this — have written budgets that exceeded the projected revenues in the future biennium and I think that needs to be changed.”

Pflug said the first thing that needs to happen “is we have to bring some responsibility to the budget process.”

“This kind of roller coaster budgeting doesn’t do anybody any favors,” she said. “It’s really hard.”

During the week prior to the start of the session, which began Jan. 12, Pflug was poring over the various budget proposals on the table for legislators to consider.

She is also passionate about health care reform, which she sees as deeply intertwined in fixing the state’s budget crisis.

“Getting the health-care budget under control is absolutely a critical aspect of the state’s budget problems,” Pflug said. “We seem to manage to spend more money and get less quality outcomes in healthcare.”

Former Covington City Councilman Pat Sullivan, D-47th, said Washington state’s economic issues are not isolated and this is “a national and international crisis.”

“We’re going to have to be really thoughtful when providing a budget that meets the needs of the state,” Sullivan said. “We’re also going to have to recognize the fact that we’re going to have to make some difficult decisions and some difficult cuts. Forty states right now are struggling with this, not just Washington state.”

Sullivan said economic development is critical to helping the state by providing cities like Covington with more tools to fund transportation and infrastructure improvements. The better the roads are the easier it is to draw in new businesses, which in turn creates jobs.

“It’s a catch 22 because they don’t have the tools to bring in the new business because they don’t have the infrastructure and they won’t have the money to build the infrastructure until they have the new business,” Sullivan said.

Glenn Anderson, R-5th District, said the budget has become such a mess it may require more than just the regular session this year.

“This economic meltdown that we’re in is not a short term thing,” Anderson said. “We really have to get back to the basics of what government is about and that’s going to be providing essential services versus things we would like to do. The No. 1 issue really is the solvency of the state. Unless we get a balanced state budget we can’t do anything else.”

Anderson said if that can be achieved then it is critical to create an environment throughout the state allowing businesses to start and flourish, to create jobs, as well as improve area roads so that residents of the district can get to work.

“We’ve got to focus on the things that are relevant to real people,” Anderson said. “I’m going to be pretty forceful about making sure that what we’re doing in state government is meaningful and relevant to real people and not special interest groups.”

He plans to focus on the recommendations that will come out of the Basic Education Finance Task Force, an 18-month bipartisan project to come up with ways to overhaul education funding, because Anderson believes the state’s budget has to be anchored by its education funding.

The other major priority for Anderson will be ensuring the state has a coherent economic development strategy.

Jay Rodne, R-5th District, said K-12 education’s “funding mechanism is broken.”

“I would say our priorities are K-12, public safety and higher education,” Rodne said. “Our state constitution says K-12 education is a paramount priority for the state. It remains to be seen if the majority will be able to do it without the Republicans in control of one or the other chambers mandating that discussion.”

Rodne said it will also be a challenge to push through transportation projects that have been on the priority list for the state, such as work on state Route 169, since 2005.

“The real issue will be how to sustain the project list that we passed in the 2005 transportation partnership act,” Rodne said. “A lot of those projects have been bumped back and some have fallen off the list entirely. The gas tax is becoming and increasingly less reliable revenue source because people are driving less and driving more fuel efficient cars. So, we’ll be having a discussion on alternative revenue sources.”

At the end of the first week of the session, Sen. Claudia Kauffman, D-47th, said the Legislature seemed to be moving along at a “comfortable pace.”

“We have recognized the urgency and taken some really meaningful steps without having a knee jerk reaction,” Kauffman said. “We have been working through and talking through a number of things.”

Dealing with the budget, she said, is going to be a two-part process dealing first with the current budget year and taking steps to ensure that is covered like continuing the hiring freeze as well as other strategies to create some savings and secondly working on the overall biennium budget.

Kauffman is also specifically working on education issues as well as other important areas such as transportation and human services. She is particularly interested in helping push road improvement projects in Covington and staying on top of the progress on the Kummer Bridge on state Route 169, which has been closed since November. The bridge is not expected to be open until late in the summer.

Pflug said the job of individual legislators will be to look at their areas of expertise to offer suggestions on how to be more efficient in those areas to help the state do better overall.

“On the upside, in theory, if we can get past a lot of posturing it is entirely possible that we could finally do some of the things that are long overdue in terms of helping Washington be more competitive and help every dollar stretch a little bit farther,” Pflug said. “There’s some fat sacred cows in Olympia and we may have to eat a few. There’s potentially some exciting opportunities to do things better.”