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Early moorning on Lopez Sound

Good News on the Budget

This morning the US Senate approved legislation extending the “enhanced” federal match for Medicaid for another 6 months, starting in January. This is good news for Washington state. The Senate paid for this change with other adjustments in the federal budget, so it doesn’t have an impact on the federal budget deficit, also a good…

August 5, 2010
Current Budget Situation

Last week Kelli Linville, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and I sent a letter to Gov Gregoire outlining our recommendation that she use the authority she has to make across the board cuts in the budget. We did this because changes in the economy and lack of action at the federal…

July 30, 2010
Viaduct Replacement Tunnel Angst

I spent an hour with The Stranger in an endorsement review last week and was astounded at the amount of time they spent on the McGinn-led hysteria about the tunnel project. I’ve talked to a couple of Seattle people since and they are all atwitter about it. The big question to me was “who pays…

July 20, 2010
Sales Tax Exemption for Canadian Residents?

British Columbia is making a minor change in their sales tax today that for some incomprehensible technical reasons winds up exempting all of their residents from paying sales tax in Washington. The City of Bellingham and Whatcom county will be heavily impacted by this and have sued the Department of Revenue to get them to…

July 1, 2010
Interesting Study on Charter Schools

The US Dept of Education just released a study on charter middle schools that’s worth reading. Click Here for the report. I’ve supported charter schools in the past as a way to experiment with new ways of building schools, but not as a panacea for all students. Just like regular schools, charter schools vary significantly…

June 30, 2010
Retire-Rehire Program Abuse

The Seattle Times has a great story on the use of the “retire-rehire” provision in state law that allows someone to retire, and then be hired back by the state or another governmnet but still collect his or her retirement. When I searched on the issue on the internet I hit a bunch of similar…

June 29, 2010
Education Data

For a number of years we’ve been working on improving the collection of data about education. This has been painful – there are 17 different data systems across K-12, plus different systems in each of the higher ed silos and no data collection at all in early learning. We’re trying to make sure we understand…

May 24, 2010
Conservation NW – People who do real work

Tricie and I spent last weekend in the Okanogan looking at the work of the local land trust and of Conservation NW, the umbrella organization that is working to protect a corridor between the Rockies and the Cascades. It’s an amazing place. Here are a couple of pictures from the trip – one mine, two…

May 22, 2010
Tax Evasion for Dummies, the video

During the session this year I did a number of presentations of a slideshow on how people evade taxes in Washington and the key points of a bill that would limit the ability for some of these scams to work. Eventually I recorded the show so that other people could see it. This is my…

May 18, 2010
Town Hall Meeting Tonight – Tuesday May 18, 2010

We sent this notice out 2 weeks ago, but I wanted to re-post it today so that you can change all of your plans to come. We intend to have an interchange with constituents on budgets, education, transportation and any other topic that comes up. We’d love to see you. Washington State Legislature Sen. Rodney…

May 18, 2010

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