Ringing the Gong for Homeless Kids

aThe Committee to End Homelessness rents a gong every year and has people volunteer for stints ringing it once for every unhoused person found in King County during the annual count on January 23rd. I stopped by for a few minutes and was able to take a few whacks.

As you can see from the sign held up in the background there were 3,772 “unsheltered” people in King County in the one-night count done earlier in the month. This is a subset of the “homeless,” as many of the larger group can find a shelter spot on any particular night. Unemployment in Bellevue has recently dropped into the “full-employment” range, but the count found 134 unsheltered people on the Eastside, amidst our cornucopia of plenty.

I chose to hit the gong 19 times to commemorate the 191 children in the Bellevue School District who were homeless in 2012-13 school year. Lake Washington had 247 the same year. It’s hard to imagine these kids making much progress in school while worried about where they are going to sleep that night.

Advice from 4th Graders – Week 1

Advice Card 1

I recently spent a fair amount of time working with Linda Myrick’s 4th grade class at Somerset. After my visit they sent me a stack of cards with advice on them. In general, it is EXCELLENT advice. I’ll be posting one a week until I run out. Perhaps at that point another 4th grade class somewhere will feel a need to contribute.

I erased the names of the contributors due to federal privacy regulations, but I know who they are. 🙂

Joel’s Law and dealing with lawsuits, disasters, and an increase in child abuse reports

The House Appropriations committee is planning to hear two bills Today, (Jan. 26, 2015):

HB 1258 – Concerning court review of detention decisions under the involuntary treatment act. This is “Joel’s Law,” a bill creating the ability for parents and other family members to provide information to the court in involuntary treatment act cases. The House passed this bill 97-1 last year and it was blocked in the Senate.

The law is named after Joel Reuter, a bright, beloved software programmer who lived on Capitol Hill. When he spun into a severe manic episode of bipolar disorder in 2013, Washington’s fractured mental-health system offered no cushion, despite pleadings from his parents and friends to have him involuntarily hospitalized.

Instead, Joel, believing he was fighting zombies, was killed by Seattle police. He was 28.
Seattle Times Editorial | January 22, 2015

Joel’s Law is a targeted intervention in the mental health system. It will allow parents and family members to provide input to a judge making the final decision to commit someone involuntarily. Parents often have the most information about the situation, enabling the judge to make a more informed decision. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories of parents who watch children drift in an out of severe mental illness, getting worse at every turn. We’re better than this, or at least we should be.

HB 1105 – Making 2015 supplemental operating appropriations. This is a super-early, super-small supplemental budget responding to lawsuits, child abuse caseload increases, and natural disasters (Oso and the big fire season.) Rep. Bruce Chandler (R-Granger) and I are jointly introducing the proposed bill, and I expect it to get significant bipartisan support.

The state lost a lawsuit ten years ago on how the homecare system for low-income seniors and the disabled is paid for. It finally made its way through the Supreme Court and the state lost. We’re paying tens of thousands a day in interest on the judgment and I’d like to get it paid off.

Last summer the state Supreme Court said that we can no longer keep patients waiting in emergency rooms because we don’t have capacity in our mental health system to evaluate and treat them. In many cases these folks are shackled to gurneys in hallways. Even in more humane cases they’re not getting the treatment they need and often get significantly worse waiting for a space.

We expect to lose a third case when a federal district court judge makes a decision in March and we are therefore taking corrective action now. This is similar to the emergency room case above, but occurs when local police arrest someone and ask for a mental health evaluation to see if the person is competent to stand trial. The law says we can’t keep them for more than 7 days in jail without an evaluation and a room at the state mental hospital. In many cases we’re keeping them in solitary confinement in county and city jails for months. People without mental issues are badly affected by solitary confinement, and for the mentally ill it’s torture and they just get worse.

Again, the Seattle Times (or at least editorial writer Jonathan Martin) is unsparing in their disdain here:

The $90 million cut from the state’s mental health system from 2009 to 2013 directly led to a state Supreme Court’s ruling in August banning very sick patients from being warehoused in hospitals, and probably will lead to a similar ruling next year regarding a lack of treatment in jails. A wavering financial commitment to court-ordered foster care reforms in the same era resulted in an extension of court oversight.
Seattle Times | November 14, 2014

With this supplemental budget we create more space at the mental hospitals, more treatment slots outside the hospitals, raise compensation for psychiatrists so we can actually hire some, and a bunch of other items that fix problems with the system. It’s not everything we need to do to have the system be functional, but it’s a step towards repairing the damage we did during the recession.

I expect the bills to both pass out of committee on Wednesday relatively unchanged and to pass out of the House either Thursday or Monday. I hope the Senate will give both serious consideration.

Nobody is going to be able to ram anything down anyone else’s throat…

I get a small cameo on the Seattle Channel Legislative preview show. I’m in the first 30 seconds, and all I get to say is “Nobody is going to be able to ram anything down anyone else’s throat.” This is in the context of host Brian Callanan talking about the split control of the Legislature. Seattle City Council President Tim Burgess gets a better quote “They have a tough job in Olympia this year.” He says it with a deeply sincere expression that makes it look like he really is sorry for us.

Both of us are right – we DO have a tough job this year and nobody will get to ram anything down anyone else’s throat. That doesn’t mean people won’t try. I’ll try to report on the theater as we go through the session.

Great Town Hall meeting last weekend

Rep-Elect Joan McBride, Sen-Elect Cyrus Habib and I had a great, if lightly attended town hall meeting last week at Redmond City Hall. We’ll do more of these, and I’ll get my email notification system working more effectively by then. I think there is one schedule in late February.

20150110_100729

The Reporter papers covered it, if somewhat desultorily. Mostly we talked about the budget, but also some education policy issues, transportation, and mental health came up a lot.

We’re also looking at doing some telephone ton hall meetings, which people seem to like, and looking into how we could do regular “office hours” on the web. Any suggestions for how we do this technologically would be great. Send us tech suggestions in email. GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Lync…?

Washington reserves becoming healthy again

The Pew Charitable Trusts devotes significant resources to assessing the fiscal health of the states. They do (mostly) great work, and the information they provide is a great comparison of how different states approach managing their finances. It’s something we look at regularly.

Reserve funding chartAs you can see Washington was slightly above the national median at the beginning of the century, then dropped below due to Initiative 728, the tech boom crash, and one of the Eyman measures that lowered taxes since we had such a “large reserve.”

We used the reserves during the great recession, and have been building them up since I became Appropriations chair. (This may be a big of hubris – we also passed a constitutional amendment protecting the fund at the beginning of this period.) The article on the Pew Website talks about how different situations in different states may affect appropriate reserve levels, which is very true. Many other states look like us, but some look like a crime scene. Illinois, for example, seems to moving asymptotically towards zero. Oregon was more than a month below zero for a while early in the aughts.

Current planning numbers have the reserve doubling over the next biennium to just under a billion. There are reasonable limits to how much you should save, but having a substantial reserve allows us to deal with normal volatility in the revenue system without making random cuts in programs or tax increases to deal with blips in revenue.

Other measures have to be considered when you are trying to assess the fiscal health of a state – Washington is in the top 5 for responsible funding levels for its pension system, a key indicator.

Scary “Drones” or Annoying Neighbors with Model Airplanes?

I’ve gotten a lot of mail recently from ACLU members supporting regulation of drone use in Washington, which I support. However, I won’t support ANY bill on drones. I think the environment is more interesting than just the current ephemeral technology concern of cheap ubiquitous model airplanes. There was a bill last year on this topic that I thought could be kindly described as a mashup of the black helicopter concerns of the far right with bizarre changes to how the 4th amendment is interpreted. The process of getting to the floor at the last minute resulted in something that was anything but clear. I voted no, and the governor vetoed it in its entirety and said that folks should start over.

I think we should create standards that are technology independent and that affect things beyond just a remote-controlled flying platform for a camera. Any bill should include:

  1. Clear language that affects legal searches and privacy invasions from paparazzi or nosy neighbors. This would be independent of the manned or unmanned status of the airplane involved. I’m just as concerned about a cop in a helicopter as I am about a cop with a model airplane.
  2. Data retention standards for the results of surveillance. This would apply to traffic cameras, toll collection, private security cameras, airplanes that fly around pretending to be cell towers, actual data from cell towers, etc. The government certainly should not be building a huge database of information about our private lives that can be mined at their leisure.

We’re going to use the law that gets written here as the standard for criminal investigations for decades, and we should think about it in a rational way and work through the legal scenarios.

The work done by Gregory McNeal at the Brookings institution is interesting and could perhaps be the basis of a reasonable bill that would provide a more consistent platform for ensuring our privacy without becoming outdated in 5 years. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/11/drones-aerial-surveillance-legislators. It’s a long paper, but a summary available here (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/brookings-institute-to-legislators-stop-worrying-learn-to-love-drones/) might entice you to wade through it.

 

Every year we get the same scam

Central WA Fire
One of many fires in Central Washington this summer.

Somebody has a problem with the Ellensburg Rodeo and Kittitas County Fair. Every year he (she?) sends a similar “notice of cancellation” of the Ellensburg Rodeo and Fair with some goofy excuse. Every year it’s not true. It’s not true this year either. Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up.

(The photo is a random shot I took of one of the many fires ravaging central Washington this summer. The view North is from the outlook on the way to Yakima a couple of weeks ago. It’s “near” Ellensburg, but isn’t causing the fair to be cancelled.) Continue reading “Every year we get the same scam”

Visiting Bertha (Many Photos)

One of the perks of the State Rep gig is that I get some cool tours. I’ve been inside pontoons on the 520 bridge, an aircraft carrier, Sound Transit tunnel construction, and last week the orifice the Bertha is creating. I took some photos that illustrate some aspects of the visit, though it’s hard to capture the sense of the project from a single walk-through.

The entry to the tunnel
The entry to the tunnel

The entrance to the actual tunnel is a large pit that I believe will eventually form the floor of the lower level of the tunnel. Right where the red erector set-like construction is in the back the level drops down and you’re below the level of the driving surface.

Continue reading “Visiting Bertha (Many Photos)”

Ross and Cyrus Raising funds for Fred Hutch

WP_20140720_001Rep. Cyrus Habib and I are riding in Obliteride August 9th and 10th to raise money for the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center and the work they do to solve the problem of cancer. We’d love your support of the cause.

You may not know this, but both Cyrus and I are cancer survivors. He has a very rare childhood cancer that cost him his eyesight when he was in elementary school. I had stage 4 non-Hodgkins Lymphoma several years ago. In my case the Hutch saved me with a stem-cell transplant. This is a treatment that was pioneered here, and Seattle is still the best place in the world if you have the cancer I had.

Without the Hutch I wouldn’t be here, and neither would thousands of other survivors. You can contribute online here