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Rep. Hunter reelected to chair House Appropriations Committee
December 11, 2014 Olympia – Rep. Ross Hunter of Medina will again head the key budget-writing efforts of the majority House Democrats in the 2015 Legislature, serving as chair of the Appropriations Committee. The Appropriations Committee is responsible for writing the two-year state operating budget, which pays for general government expenditures like teacher salaries, health…
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WA State Budget – Ross to talk, show charts, take questions
I’m planning to give an update on the state budget situation Wednesday December 10th at the 48th District Democrats December meeting. The meeting starts at 7:00 PM. It’s not a super-long talk, but I’ll take questions for half an hour or so. They have a section on the bylaws that starts at 8:00 that I’m…
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Man Bites Dog
I got the following email from WA State Auditor Troy Kelley today. It’s part of the performance audits his office does to improve the functioning of state agencies. The audits have skewered lots of agencies over the years since initiative 901 passed. We don’t see too many emails like this because the auditor tends to (quite appropriately)…
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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…
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Printable version of budget post
2015-17 WA State Budget (PDF File, requires Adobe Reader)
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WA Budget 2015-17: High Degree of Difficulty
When writing about the budget it’s important to share good news as well as bad. First the good: (it’s short) the revenue forecast picked up a little bit. The bad is that we face one of the most difficult budget cycles of my time in the Legislature, and perhaps worse than we’ve seen in many…
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Super-Interesting Changes in The Amount of Driving We Do
WSDOT released a new forecast of gas tax revenue based on a new forecast of how much people are likely to drive in the future. Less. There are a lot of factors that drive this change, and you can read more about them on Sightline, The Seattle Times, or the actual wonky report itself, published…
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Golden Crayon Award
The Early Learning Action Alliance gave me a “Golden Crayon” award for my efforts last session to pass the “Early Start” bill. The bill had a lot of moving parts, but the main idea was to focus on improving the quality of the childcare we have now so that we reap the benefits down the road in…
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Roundtable Urges Transportation Investment
Crosscut reported today on a press conference by Steve Mullin, the head of the Washington Roundtable urging the Legislature to pass a transportation package, and touting a Boston Consulting Group study that the package would generate a lot of economic activity in the next 30 years – far more than the cost of the projects.…
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Teen Births Decline!
I got email from one of our regular contributors yesterday that wanted us to follow Colorado’s example in reducing teenage births in Washington. Since 2008 teenage births (to women age 15-19) have declined almost 40% in Colorado, an amazing statistic. The website this is from (www.popconnect.org) claims this has saved Colorado $41 million in that…
