Eastside residents invited to February 20 town hall with local legislators

CALENDAR ANNOUNCEMENT

Eastside residents invited to February 20 town hall with local legislators

 February 11, 2010

State Sen. Rodney Tom (D-Bellevue) and Reps. Ross Hunter (D-Medina) and Deb Eddy (D-Kirkland) invite Eastside residents to a Town Hall on Saturday, February 20 for a discussion of the current legislative session.

 The legislators will provide updates on the state’s budget situation, education issues like Race to the Top and finance reform, and the SR 520 project. Residents are encouraged to come with questions or ideas about other issues of interest.

 When: Saturday, February 20 at 11 a.m.
Where: Crossroads Community Center (16000 NE 10th Street, Bellevue)

 For more information, contact Rep. Hunter’s Legislative Assistant Marilyn Pedersen at (425) 453-3064 or pedersen.marilyn@leg.wa.gov.

# # #

Contacts:                   Sen. Rodney Tom – (360) 786-7694 or tom.rodney@leg.wa.gov

Rep. Ross Hunter – (360) 786-7936 or hunter.ross@leg.wa.gov

Rep. Deb Eddy – (360) 786-7848 or eddy.deb@leg.wa.gov

Media Staff:               Jaime Smith – (360) 786-7631 or smith.jaime@leg.wa.gov

Town Hall Meeting Thursday Jan 7th

On Thursday Jan 7th Sen. Tom, Rep. Eddy and I will host yet another of our regular town hall meetings. This one will be held in the Peter Kirk room at Kirkland City Hall, starting at 6:30 in the evening. We have the room for 90 minutes. Rodney, Deb and I will offer opening remarks and will take questions. You may find my email newsletter relevant and useful prep for the meeting. Click 2009-12-15 Newsletter for a printable version.

The Seattle Times covered our press release on the town hall meeting with this (light) piece: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/bellevueblog/2010627332_520budgetcutsonagendaateastsidelegislativetownhall.html

Thursday Jan 7th. 6:30 PM

Kirkland City Hall – Peter Kirk Room
123 Fifth Avenue
Kirkland, WA

Click here for a map

Telephone Town Hall

I’m trying a new thing this year – a “telephone” town hall. I sit with a headset and we have an autodialer call as many of you as we can. We give you the opportunity to stay on the call if you want to participate. Others who have done this have had thousands of people stay on the line. I can’t imagine that many people are interested in what I have to say, but it’s worth a shot.

Tuesday December 15th at 6:30 pm.

If you don’t get a call, you can call in yourself toll-free at 877-229-8493. Participants will be prompted to enter an ID code which is 15390. You can call in up to ten minutes early.

I’ll also be “liveblogging” the call, whatever that means. I’ll practice on Monday so it’s not stupid… To participate online: To join the live blog, click through from my legislative website at www.housedemocrats.wa.gov/members/hunter or follow along on Twitter by following @rosshunter or searching #rosshunter.

I don’t usually like these as I think I should stand up in a meeting and take your questions directly. It’s too easy in a format like this to only take convenient questions. However, they reach many more people than are able to physically come to a town hall meeting. I’m experimenting. If you like it, let me know and I’ll do more of them.

We have a real town hall in early January as well.

Thursday Jan 7th, 6:30 PM
Kirkland City Hall – Peter Kirk Room
123 Fifth Avenue
Kirkland, WA

Tolling I-90?

One of the issues we will need to decide this year is if we should add a toll to I-90 to help pay for the 520 bridge. There are a number of reasons why this might be a good idea – the diversion from 520 to I-90 might turn it into a parking lot, there might be no other way to raise the money, etc. Here is a short (1 question) poll to see what you think.

Ending Homelessness?

Last week I attended the annual breakfast for the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. We’re 3 or 4 yours into a ten-year plan to take this on. I’m concerned that the financial crisis we’re in will delay accomplishment of some of the goals, but these folks are serious, practical people who are working a complex, integrated plan to address the issue.

The January 30, 2009 count put our total at 8,961 individuals in shelters or living on the street in King County. There are hundreds or thousands more that didn’t get counted for one reason or another. Over half are families with children.

Their plan has a bunch of moving parts and it’s well thought out and documented. You can read about it at www.cehkc.org. Their legislative agenda this year has some unrealistic financial goals given the state of Washington’s budget, but it’s important to keep this in front of us  – we need to make sure we continue to invest in housing for the very poor segment of this population that needs transitional help. My personal belief is that we will need to do some work to rationalize land-use planning with local zoning to provide a higher supply of building lots close in, that are affordable, and that are within walking distance of public transit before we’ll be able to make serious inroads into housing affordability for the working poor, but that shouldn’t block us from making sure we’re starting at the most needy with public investment.

One item on their legislative agenda will come before the Finance committee – ensuring that property tax assessments are commensurate with resale restrictions on affordable homes. If someone buys a home through Habitat for Humanity and it has a clause that restricts the resale value built into the deed that restriction should be reflected in the assessment. If not, the carrying costs of the property will be out of scale with reality. There are other cases where this comes up and it’ll be something we look at carefully. Property tax assessments are a complex beast and I try to be careful about how we change the system, but this looks doable.

Forum on 520

My seatmate Rep. Deb Eddy (D-48) is hosting a forum on the design process for 520 tomorrow night (Tuesday Oct. 6) at 7:00 PM at Bellevue City Hall. She’ll have DOT people there with fabulous maps, timelines, etc. It’s her event, but I expect we’ll have a lively conversation. Here’s what Deb said about the agenda:

Our purpose is to review the various “projects” involving SR520 (which includes the tolling work and pontoon construction in addition to remaining design issues, all kind of going on parallel tracks right now), next steps and timelines.  While working with eastside chambers, cities and other civic groups is important, it’s also important for us legislators to facilitate these forums, community you’all-comes, which allow us to talk about issues that are outside WSDOT’s purview or authority.

I am sorry about the late notice – I have just got my website/email system back up.

Electronic Tax Filing

Last year we passed legislation requiring businesses to file their tax payments and returns electronically. The intent is to save significant time and effort in the Department of Revenue (DOR) processing paper forms. This will also cut down on errors on both ends of the process. I believe we get to eliminate 14 positions as a result of this change.

I had a constituent express some concern to me about “allowing the DOR unfettered access to his bank account.” This is not an unreasonable concern, though the department did promise me they would smile while they stripped business bank accounts. In following up with the department I got the following response, which lays out 4 options in increasing distance from the department. I believe one of these options will work for almost everyone.

Continue reading “Electronic Tax Filing”

Fun things you get to do as a legislator

In August I attended a picnic put on by Alpha Supported Living for their residents. They held the picnic at Crossroads Community Park (a fabulous place behind Crossroads mall.) The main activity at this annual event is provided by a group called Outdoors for All. Their mission is to enrich the quality of life for adults and children with disabilities through outdoor recreation.

There was a lot of enriching going on. They had a collection of adapted bicycles (mostly trikes) that worked for people with disabilities. Watching people use these bikes was fabulous. I was reminded of the look on my kid’s faces when they first got a bicycle to work without training wheels.

To check out the work of the Outdoors for All people, go to their website www.outdoorsforall.org. I urge you to support them.

Getting the helmet on
Getting the helmet on

Continue reading “Fun things you get to do as a legislator”

Economic and Revenue Forecast

(Originally posted 9/17/09)

I serve on the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council for Washington, and today we had our quarterly “Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors” meeting. The state economist makes some projects and the economists in the room argue about it for a couple of hours. This is more fascinating than you might think, or at least it’s interesting to me.

Dr. Raha’s full presentation can be found here. If you’re a numbers geek it’s worth reading.

The short story is that it looks like we’re at the bottom of the recession, but that the recovery will not be all that sudden. Employment recovery typically lags the economic recovery as companies put off hiring as long as they can to reduce risk. It looks like the residential housing market has hit bottom and started back up. This is one of the big drivers in the WA economy.

ERFC-1

The commercial real-estate market is another story, as are many of the local banks that invest heavily in these projects.

EFRC-2

The big teaser for us is the following slide. On sept. 17th we receive the revenue forecast, which has lots more data folded into it. This is a hopeful piece of data – we don’t want continued deterioration in the revenue model. I still expect us to enter the session with some significant work to do on the budget.

EFRC-3

Information Services Board

I serve on the Information Services Board, (ISB) a group of high-level state and private sector people who review and approve the state’s investment in information technology. Specific projects that are high risk get a lot of attention from the group. It’s interesting to me, and one of the few things I do that’s directly related to my previous life at Microsoft.

I wrote the following text as I sat in the meeting last week.

We are reviewing a number of programs:

FamLink, a replacement of an ancient dysfunctional system to keep track of outcomes for children in the care of the state in some way or another. We track cases of child abuse and other problems, plus placements of foster children, etc. The system handles payments and outcomes. They’ve done a reasonable job replacing the system. The first part went live in February 2009. Phase 2 of the project is a little late, and we’re giving them a few more months. (It’s not like we have any choice – the project is late.)

The old data about outcomes for kids is intractible and hard to translate into new formats. This doesn’t affect payments to vendors, but does affect the amount of information that’s available to people who track placements. They’ve done a reasonable job of releasing functionality one step at a time, and fitting it into the middle of complex web of accounting softare at the state. I’m comfortable with the risk choice here.

Another project we’re looking at is a system the Office of Financial Management (OFM) wanted to use to manage grants, loans and contracts across the whole state. This was a disaster, and we would up not delivering a system. We pulled the plug a while ago and today we’re hearing the post-mortem.

Unfortunately, it seems from the presentation that we’re paying the post-mortem vendor by the word. The short story is that OFM tried to do too many things in one system and didn’t ask enough specific questions in the planning. It’s not a huge system, but a painful lesson that we learn over and over again.

The Court system is the next presenter (this is a half-day meeting.) an aside during their presentation is that they are expecting 6000 new “infractions” a day as a result of the tolling methodology being chosen for the 520 bridge scheme. I had realized that there would be some interaction with the court as a result of all electronic tolling, but this seems over the top. I will investigate this and see if we can come up with a better system. (Later update: this was a big problem and is getting fixed. The interesting question is “How do we most efficiently allow people to pay online?” rather than “How do we give people tickets when they don’t pay in advance?” We are working on changing the approach.)