WSDOT Awards SR 520 Widening Contract in Redmond!

Here’s a press release from WSDOT on the 520 project in Redmond. This is a great thing, as is the inclusion of the 36th street bridge over 520 in Redmond, adding another crossing and exit off the freeway, further reducing traffic congestion in Redmond.

REDMOND — Relief is in sight for commuters stuck in daily congestion on SR 520 in Redmond. WSDOT has awarded PCL Construction Services, Inc., a contract to widen SR 520 between SR 202 and West Lake Samamish Parkway.

During the next two years, this $37.7 million contract will employ approximately 370 workers.

Crews will add a merge lane and a carpool lane to SR 520, widening the highway from two lanes to four in each direction.

Traffic engineers estimate this will reduce peak morning commute times by 60 percent and reduce peak evening commute times by 75 percent. When this project is complete, carpools, vanpools and transit will enjoy a seamless HOV lane between the east end of the SR 520 floating bridge and SR 202.

This work is the final piece of the puzzle for improvements along the SR 202 / SR 520 corridor, which began in 2004.

WSDOT already has made major improvements in this area of King County. Last September, crews finished widening three miles of SR 202 from SR 520 to Sahalee Way in rural King County. Crews also completed a flyover ramp in February 2008 that eliminated the left turn for drivers going from SR 202 to SR 520.
Construction on the SR 520 widening is expected to begin in April and should be wrapped up in late 2011. For more information about this project, please visit: www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR520/WLakeSamPk_SR202/.

Important Bills

The Legislature is a cyclical activity. We go through a phase where everyone creates proposed new laws and files them. This is call “dropping” bills, because you drop the signed pieces of paper into a basket called the “hopper.” The bills are heard in committee, and the ones that are not patently ridiculous are passed out of committee.

They are then referred to the rules committee, which approves bills that are uncontroversial (and therefore tend not to do anything) or that are IMPORTANT, and usually controversial.

We are now passing the bills in the first category. These are important to someone, but in aggregate this seems like a silly way to do work. As an example, we are now working our way through the following bills:

  1. Minimum passing distances from bicycles. (I’ve been buzzed more often than I would like, so it’s important to some people.) The bills defines what “reasonable” means in the current code as 3 feet. There were 7 amendments, and the bill was argued for an hour. The amendments were what I would call “dilatory,” or designed to waste time. It worked.
  2. Impounding the cars (or bicycles) of people involved in prostitution. I was a little concerned about the civil liberties implications of this, but it’s pretty carefully worked out. If a person isn’t charged they get all their money (and their car) back. This took a bunch of time too.
  3. Creating a lottery fishing program at Spirit Lake. It seems that some people snuck a load of trout into Spirit Lake at Mt. St. Helens and have been sneaking in to fish for them. We passed a bill that creates a lottery program to give fishing license for the lake, and added a requirement that they sterilize their fishing equipment. This seems hard to enforce to me, but all the fishing people seem enthused about it.

I don’t want you to think that we spend all of our time working on small bills. It’s just that at 9:00 at night, on a Friday, it seems like we spend forever working on these bills. While this is going on though, I have been working with other members to work out details on larger issues, like our school funding bills and the proposal I have to work on city/county finance issues, digital goods taxation, and the other bills I’m responsible for in the tax arena. Of course, I recognize that other people may put the bills I care about in the “small bill” category.

Most of the substantive bills will be worked out next week.

Education Financing Update

For the entire 6 years I’ve been in the legislature I’ve worked on school funding. I’ve tried to improve the amount and the efficacy of use of the money. This year a bipartisan group of six legislators introduced a package of reforms coming from the Basic Education Financing Task Force report. I’ve written about it in this blog before (http://s485995026.onlinehome.us/?cat=3) and will in the future.

We’re in the middle of a tumultuous period in the evolution of the bills. Our original bills (HB 1410 and SB 5444) were a 110 page first draft that we expected to engender a robust discussion. We were right about part of it – the discussion was robust, but unfortunately not substantive. The Olympia-based education groups have been very negative on the proposal, with most outside groups supportive. The legislation changes distribution of billions of dollars, and we were probably naive to expect change of this magnitude to go smoothly.

We’ve taken a new approach – we’re starting with a blank slate instead of a large first draft. We’ve introduced two bills with similar titles but no real content. The new bills are HB 2261 and SB 6048.  We will move these bills through the system while we work on re-crafting a comprehensive bill. This is the strategy we used successfully in fixing the math standards last year.

Behind the scenes the House and Senate are working daily on trying to build consensus around the big pieces of the package. We’ll recapitulate the process we used to build the original legislation with the six of us in a room, but with many more people involved. I expect this to be painful, but it’s a necessary step. Pat, Skip, Rodney, Fred, Glenn and I spent hundreds of hours learning and working with the alternatives. We’ll try to lead everyone through the same process, but in less time.

This will be a circuitous process. We need your input as we move forward. Thanks for staying engaged.

Local Government Financing Plan

Final Report of the Washington State Local Governance Study Commission.

…the underlying structural problem for King County budgeting is the mismatch between tax base and service costs in the unincorporated areas. The solution to this, which is encouraged by the Growth Management Act, is to ensure that the remaining unincorporated areas within the urban growth area get annexed to an adjacent city

King County Budget Brief 2009 – Washington Research Council

The state has established a significant number of requirements for cities and counties over the years, but has not delivered a reasonable set of alternatives for them to raise the funds necessary to deliver on those requirements. The plight of cities and counties has been exacerbated by the recent changes in tax policy driven by initiatives that have reduced the growth of property tax and eliminated most of the money from the MVET, most of which was distributed to counties as revenue sharing.

In this 2009 legislative session I will not be able to deliver a broad, well-thought-through set of policies on this topic that balances the responsibilities of local governments with their taxing authority or other revenue sources. I will take this up in the interim when we have more time and fewer distractions. In the meantime, the state needs to provide some options for local governments to avoid fiscal disasters.

My strategy here is to propose a number of changes, some permanent and some temporary, that provide local governments with the ability to respond to this temporary fiscal crisis. In some cases this is the ability to generate additional local revenue, in other cases it’s the removal of rules about supplantation that provide additional flexibility to these governments so that they can respond to the needs of their citizens in these difficult times.

Continue reading “Local Government Financing Plan”

Open Letter to Teachers about HB 1410

I’ve had a lot of questions from teachers on HB 1410 that seem to indicate some misunderstanding of our intent and I believe a misreading of the bill. 1410 is a serious attempt to address school funding inadequacies and the structural problems that have built up over 30 years since the last major revision.  The worst structural problem affecting teachers is the legislature’s inability to give raises to teachers without bankrupting school districts. This occurs due to the interaction between TRI pay and the number of teachers local districts have to hire to meet even a weak definition of “basic education.”  This is crazy, and not in the interest of anyone in the system, most particularly teachers.

Our seminal observation about the current system is that it’s resulted in a pretty serious decline in the relative competitiveness of teacher salaries over the last few decades. The stat I use with some frequency is that the SAT scores of students entering teaching programs at universities have declined 75 points over the last 25-30 years. The number is national, not specific to Washington, but is an indicator that we’re losing our attractiveness to the top students. This is a recipe for failure of the system, as we totally depend on teacher quality for any results. The first thing we MUST do is start with competitive teacher salaries. Our proposal includes a comparable wage survey of the labor markets in Washington, comparing teacher salaries to jobs that have similar educational and talent requirements.

Continue reading “Open Letter to Teachers about HB 1410”

Possible Budget Choices – Criminal Justice Costs

For the past 15 years we’ve been on a trend of increasing the number of incarcerated people. We now lead the world in the percentage of people in jail. It costs the state an average of about $30,000 per year to put someone in prison, plus all the costs of the courts and police/sheriff. Sometimes this makes a lot of sense, and sometimes it does not. The 2003 Washington State Legislature directed the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) to determine if there are changes to Washington’s sentencing structure that could reduce costs without endangering public safety. WSIPP is a non-partisan research agency that does this kind of scientific analysis of policy questions for us.

Here’s their conclusion: (full study here)

We find that some evidence-based programs can reduce crime, but others cannot. Per dollar of spending, several of the successful programs produce favorable returns in investment. Public policies incorporating these options can yield positive outcomes for Washington. We project the long-run effects of three example portfolios of  evidence-based options: a “current level” option as well as “moderate” and “aggressive” implementation portfolios.

We find that if Washington successfully implements a moderate-to-aggressive portfolio of evidence-based options, a significant level of future prison construction can be avoided, taxpayers can save about two billion dollars, and crime rates can be reduced.

This is necessarily a political activity. Competing editorial voices will weigh in. For example, John Carlson has an op-ed that ran in a variety of places decrying a bill that would “gut” the 3-strikes law. (Link here to Bellevue Reporter version.) Neal Pierce, a reasonably moderate voice, calls out for smarter thinking on community corrections as a way to save money. (Full article here.) Washington’s incarceration rate is significantly lower than the rest of the nation, but we should still look carefully at this. The Seattle Times weighs in in opposition to Carlson, but did print his op-ed. (Times Editorial here.) Full disclosure: Carlson was the prime force behind the 1993 initiative that put 3-strikes in place.

There will be a lot of noise about this, and I will get many letters on both sides of the issue. Getting to the right place, where we balance public safety with the costs of incarceration is too important to leave to pure political noise. Not wasting money is not being “soft on crime.” Letting too many people out because we’re not willing to pay the costs of the criminal justice system is equally silly. We should also make sure that when we consider the larger issues that affect the state we also consider the effects our decisions have on counties and their costs. We change the burden on them, but don’t give them the revenue options to deal with the costs we impose.

The world is a complicated place. It’s important that we not view it as just black and white. It’s not.

 

February Revenue Collections Report

We got more bad news on the economy last week – another $63 million decline in the collections data. This was the month of Dec 10 – Jan 10, a very important period in our retail sales data.  Our total decline for the 2nd quarter of fiscal year 2009 (Oct, Nov and Dec 2008) is almost $200 million. This is on top of the decline in the November forecast. As you can expect, we’re very concerned about the implications here, both for the current fiscal year and for the 2009-2011 budget that we start working on next.

You can read the collections report here: http://www.erfc.wa.gov/pubs/feb09.pdf.

About 2 weeks ago I provided guidance to our budget team to use the pessimistic prediction from our November forecast as the baseline from which to start the budget effort. This means that we assume that the economy will produce $1.9 billion less in tax revenues in the 09-11 biennium, and another $300 million in the current fiscal year. The $200 we’re already down, with 6 months to go leaves me concerned that this may not have been pessimistic enough.

Continue reading “February Revenue Collections Report”

WACOPS Legislator of the Year

Ross is presented the WACOPS Legislator of the Year award.
Ross is presented the WACOPS Legislator of the Year award.

For some reason the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs has named me their “legislator of the year.”

I’m always happy to be recognized for the work I do, and these guys are an important part of the fabric of our community. I’m receiving the award from Mike Pentony and Steve Lynch, two of Bellevue’s finest.

The News Tribune covers Basic Ed plan

Peter Callaghan wrote about our tremendous hearing in the House yesterday. We had 120 people testify, of whom only 13 were opposed. The most amusing juxtaposition was when a panel of 4 superintendents delivered a letter from all 35 school district superintendents in the Puget Sound region endorsing the bill was followed by the director of the WA Association of School Administrators opposing it. The 35 districts in Puget Sound have about 40% of the students in the state. 🙂

We have a lot of work to do on the bill still and will report on it as we go, but Peter Callaghan’s piece is nice coverage.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/columnists/callaghan/story/609854.html

Urban Legends – Emissions based on engine displacement

In 2006 a senator introduced a bill (SB 6900) that would have charged a vehicle registration fee every year based on the size of your engine and not on the use of the vehicle. The bill did not receive a hearing, did not come up for a vote, and never passed. It does not even exist in this legislative session. Nevertheless I continue to get 20+ emails a week on the issue.

While providing incentives to people to purchase more fuel efficient vehicles may be reasonable policy, I’m not fond of this bill. There is a federal gas-guzzler tax that is much larger than this fee. If that doesn’t work our fee wouldn’t either. You also need to consider usage. I own a full-size Ford F-150 pickup with a V-8 engine. I drive it about 3000 miles a year hauling stuff places. The truck is 10 years old and I expect to pass it down to my kids with less than 100,000 miles on it a long time from now. My wife’s Prius generates more emmissions because she drives it a lot more.

I voted for aligning us with the California emmissions standards to try to keep us from filling the air with needless particulates, but I think this bill doesn’t work. I didn’t support it in 2006, and I wouldn’t support it now.

Please stop sending me email about this dead bill. Also, there are no alligators in the sewer system.