After weeks of late-night deliberations and lengthy, often emotional public hearings, the King County Council is getting ready to release its "striking legislation"—a marked-up, amended version of the budget King County Executive Ron Sims rolled out last month. The county is facing a $93 million budget deficit this year—a shortfall that will be followed an estimated $40 million deficit in 2010.

Council finance committee chairman Larry Phillips says the council has "rearranged" the items in the executive's budget, cutting some programs to preserve others it considers more critical. Many of those programs, however, will remain in the county's "lifeboat"—a temporary funding source that will dry up in six months if the state legislature doesn't give the county new funding options to pay for programs that aren't mandated by state law.

According to Phillips, the council's budget preserves the King County Sheriff's drug and gang units; fully funds drug court, mental health court, and family services (three courts that were on the chopping block), at least through June; restores immunization services and a program that tracks tubercolosis, which is on the rise in King County; keeps all the public health clinics open; and extends funding for family-planning clinics for nine months. "We found some of those cuts to be unconscionable," Phillips says.

Although Phillips was unsurprisingly cagey about what the council decided to cut (the legislation itself, which will make that clear, should be available in a few minutes), he says some of the savings came from shifting general-fund money from programs like funding for roads in unincorporated King County and the parks reserve into the sheriff's office and public health. Because none of that money came from dedicated funding sources like levies, Phillips says, "there's no legal problem" with moving it to unrelated programs.

That doesn't solve the county's larger budget problem, of course. Next year, the county will hit up the state legislature for new funding sources—joining many smaller counties in asking Olympia for help . The state could give the county access to new revenues by letting them levy a utility tax on unincorporated areas; giving county leaders flexibility to spend dedicated money (like mental-health levy dollars) on existing services (like mental-health court); or allowing the county to tax unincorporated parts of the county inside potential annexation areas at the same rate as nearby incorporated towns (enabling the county to pay for services to those areas and removing some of the incentive for those areas to resist annexation.)

According to Phillips, the council and Sims are "99 percent" in agreement on the budget, with funding for Metro the one remaining sticking point.