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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…
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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…
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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…
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Interesting Presentation on California’s Education Funding Issues
California’s issues are in many ways similar to Washington’s. Doing a constitutional re-write to allow the locals to carry the costs of education would be interesting, and his solution would probably result in more funding across the board. I would have to play with some numbers (a lot) to see if met my fairness bar,…
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2009 Session Notes – Tax Policy
(I orginally posted this on a different blog in April 2009. I am consolidating into a single presence and am re-posting here. ) A number of key tax policy bills were passed this year. These are interesting to me because I chair the Finance committee and am responsible for making sure the system works. I…
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Changes to Sales Tax Resale Certificates (SB 6173)
The Senate budget assumed a change in how sales tax resale certificates worked. As the bill implementing this idea came over from the Senate it made substantial changes to how resale certificates work for retailers and wholesalers (which was fine) but also made a change I found punitive to how resale certificates worked for contractors…
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Eastside state representatives vote no on 520 tolling legislation
Reps. Eddy and Hunter say legislation does not address key issues related to funding, process or Eastside projects For immediate release April 17, 2009 OLYMPIA – The Legislature today narrowly approved HB 2211 which authorizes early tolls to finance the SR 520 floating bridge and gives the Washington State Department of Transportation authority to spend…
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Tuition Increases?
The Seattle Times wrote an interesting article in this morning’s paper about the budget question facing us about higher education. Both House and Senate proposals do terrible things to the higher education system in Washington. It’s worth the read. We have to decide if we want to allow the universities to raise tuition, or just…
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HB 2343 – National Board Certification Bonus
HB 2343 does a number of ugly things to the K12 system as part of the terrible, devastating budget cuts to education and everything else the state does. One of the proposed changes is to permanently eliminate the inflation adjustment to the bonus we pay to teachers who have achieved National Board Certification. I do…
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National Popular Vote
The national popular vote proposal is an interesting approach to changing the 222 year old way we elect US Presidents.The idea is to have a compact between states totally more than 50% of the electoral college. We would all agree that we would allocate all of our electoral votes to the winner of the national…
