Halfway through the 2015 Legislative Session, District 23 lawmakers faced a friendly and inquisitive crowd during a town hall at Bainbridge Island City Hall last Saturday.

Education funding, Highway 305 traffic, taxes and police body cameras were just a few items on the wide-ranging list of topics fielded by Sen. Christine Rolfes, Rep. Drew Hansen and Rep. Sherry Appleton at the 90-minute meeting.

“I came here to hear you,” Appleton told the standing-room-only crowd of residents from Bainbridge, Poulsbo, North Kitsap and beyond.

The ample audience mostly heard Hansen, however.

The junior lawmaker of the threesome — who is chairman of the House Higher Education Committee and also serves on the Appropriations Committee and the Judiciary Committee — turned out to be the trio’s go-to guy as many of the questions from the audience dealt with spending or education issues.

Even so, Rolfes and Appleton didn’t dodge the spotlight.

Many of the questions — which were submitted on question cards and moderated by Poulsbo Mayor Becky Erickson — revolved around education. One person asked if teachers could expect to see a cost-of-living raise. Common Core State Standards, student assessments and computer science training were also highlighted.

Appleton said it’s been seven years since the state raised pay for teachers.

“That’s not fair to working people,” Appleton said. “Prices are going up. Costs have gone up.”

Appleton said an increase had been built into the governor’s budget and would be in the House spending plan, and that she expected it to pass.

“That’s something I intend to fight for this year,” she said.

Much remains to be seen, she added, since lawmakers are awaiting the March revenue forecast.

January and February forecasts have included an extra $254 million, she said, from what was expected earlier.

“We don’t know how much money we have at this point,” Appleton added.

Rolfes noted that the state has “seriously underfunded” education since the 1970s, and billions were cut from K-12 education during the Great Recession.

The Washington Constitution requires the state to provide ample funding for education, and the state Supreme Court ruled in its McCleary decision that the state has not been adequately funding education.

And the state Legislature is currently in contempt of court for not having a plan to fund education.

There is general agreement that $1.3 billion is needed to fund basic education, which includes all-day kindergarten, smaller elementary classroom sizes, plus state support for school supplies, maintenance and transportation, Rolfes said.

“$1.3 billion doesn’t cover a modernized science laboratory, it doesn’t cover smaller class sizes in high school or middle school. It doesn’t cover highly capable funding to help kids who are really, really good at school. There are lots of things that $1.3 billion doesn’t cover,” Rolfes said.

Teacher salaries also shouldn’t be covered by local levies, she added, but should be funded by the state. Districts across the state currently use property tax levies to supplement teacher salary funding that comes from Olympia.

Statewide, that’s about $9,000 on average that districts are paying to close the “market gap” between what the state contributes to teacher salaries and what teachers will accept.

“We have to fix the compensation part of that as well,” Rolfes said, which would add another $1 billion of state support to schools.

“We’re talking about a lot of money,” she said.

Possible solutions include higher taxes, cuts in other parts of the budget, and budgetary “gimmicks” that involve temporary shifts in spending.

Hansen said the Supreme Court order in the McCleary lawsuit was good, great even.

“We should be investing more money in schools,” he said to loud applause.

“Doing things like all-day kindergarten statewide is expensive. It cannot be done cheaply,” he added.

Options for finding more money are lacking. The state can’t take a shortsighted approach such as skipping annual payments to pension systems, such as New Jersey has done, Hansen said.

But several hundred million could be obtained from closing tax loopholes, and other tax code changes, such as raising the sales tax.

“I don’t think there’s any appetite for raising the sales tax. It’s really high in the state, anyways,” Hansen said, and property tax increases are also problematic.

New areas of potential revenue include a tax on carbon polluters and a capital gains tax.

A capital gains tax would raise “significant funds,” Hansen said.

Where the House ends up, he said, will be known in the next few weeks when a House budget is rolled out.

The next big topic was Highway 305, and Poulsbo’s mayor got a big laugh from the crowd when she held up the thick stack of question cards about the critical connection between the island and the Kitsap Peninsula.

The crowd laughed again when it wasn’t clear who would step up to talk about the highway.

Rolfes rose to the challenge with the highway’s current toll: “Horrible congestion when the ferry lets out at rush hour and horrible congestion coming onto the island in the morning.”

It was a combination of poor school bus service with parents who are driving their kids to school, she said, plus commuters heading to the ferry or work on the island.

“The other reality is that the bridge is old,” she said.

On the state rating of bridges, it was about a 50 on a 1-to-100 scale.

“Technically, for anybody who has ever gone to school, that’s a failing grade,” Rolfes said.

The state Department of Transportation considers it “functionally obsolete.”

It’s also not fully retrofitted for earthquakes, she said, and the design of the bridge itself adds to congestion.

The bridge will need to be replaced, within the next 20 to 30 years, she said, “if not sooner.”

The reality is that state funding only exists for bridges in much worse shape, Rolfes said.

Planning for a new bridge must include an analysis of Highway 305 itself.

“We can’t have the bridge conversation without having the 305 conversation,” the senator said.

Rolfes said she had been advocating for funding for a design study of the busy highway.

“We didn’t specify ‘four-lane it,’ we didn’t specify ‘do nothing,'” she said.

The transportation proposal out of the Senate has a little over $30 million over the next 16 years to look at design and identify congestion relief and safety efforts on Highway 305. The hope is the funding may also help cover initial costs for new bridge design.

Without a transportation package and a gas tax increase, “that all goes away,” Rolfes added.

The Bainbridge meeting was the first of two planned town halls for the trio on March 14.

The three lawmakers also hosted a town hall in Silverdale, where issues ran the gamut from McCleary and education to mental health funding.