Democrats in the Legislature ordered the computers built this year, but they didn’t decide how to pay for the benefits programs the computers will be used to handle. They say they’re laying the groundwork for what will be popular programs in the future: a paid leave program for new parents and a tax credit for the working class.

Republicans railed against the spending, saying the Democrats want to claim that they’ve started the programs in an election year but don’t want to pay for them.

The task for state agencies is not unlike building a railroad without knowing if the train will come.

“We are moving ahead as best we can with the authority that was vested in us. We are certainly going to need some definitive policy fixes from the Legislature here before we move ahead,” said Sheryl Hutchison, communications director for the Employment Security Department.

The new budget gave the agency $6.2 million to build a computer system capable of delivering the checks for paid family leave. Under the 2007 bill that created the program, each year 36,000 new parents would receive $250 a week for nine weeks through the program beginning in October 2009. The program is open to all residents.

“We’re feeling very crunched for time,” Hutchison said. “The good news is we have a lot of experience in unemployment insurance, and there’s a lot of corollaries there.”

The computer system the agency is building will handle only the part of the program that writes the checks. Assuming the Legislature decides how to raise the needed $40 million to $45 million a year, such as by starting a payroll tax, another system would collect it.

A complete system will cost $18 million, according to early estimates. California had to rebuild the computer that runs its family leave program in 2004, ultimately spending $25 million.

Why now? Better to start early on the family leave computer system, knowing that it will be delivered in the future, Washington Democrats say.

“You don’t necessarily launch something like that overnight. Ultimately, it’s good for children, and it ties in very closely with the goal we have of advancing early learning,” said Senate Democratic Leader Lisa Brown, hours after the Legislature passed the budget.

She defended spending an additional $1.3 million to build a computer to deliver a state match to the federal earned income tax credit, even though the Legislature did not commit to giving the refunds to working-class families.

“The budget reality is, we don’t know if we’ll be able to do that tax relief in the next biennium,” she said.

“Under any circumstance, it would take a couple years to set it up so that it could be administered efficiently and effectively. And the Senate felt this was the right time to get this going.”

The Legislature passed an earlier law offering state employees health savings accounts, but the old computer cannot handle them, said Dave Wasser, spokesman for the Health Care Authority, which runs the system.