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The first online-only news site in state history to get media credentials to cover the state capitol and Seattle city hall, PubliCola has been called a “must-read” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a hot “New Media Mover and Shaker” by Seattle Magazine—which also cited our own Erica C. Barnett as the city's No. 1 news nerd.

Hazardous Substance Tax Gutted in House

Politics, This Washington   March 2, 2010 at 1:12 pm Josh Feit

The news was worse for environmentalists than I thought.

This morning’s Fizz reported that even though the hazardous substance tax—environmentalists’ top priority this session—isn’t in either the Senate or House revenue packages, the House had queued it up for a floor vote as a separate bill.

But unlike the original bill—which raised $225 million annually by tripling 1988′s voter-approved tax on hazardous substances like petroleum from .7 to 2 percent—the amended version would raise the tax by .4 percent over four years, raising just $10 million this year and $45 million after four years.

The amended version—Rep. Larry Springer (D-45) led the revisions—also exempts petroleum exports from the tax.

“The bill is still moving,” Cliff Traisman, lobbyist for the Washington Environmental Council and Washington Conservation Voters says, looking for a silver lining, “and we’re going to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

The confusing thing for Traisman, he says, is that “we thought we had the most robust revenue proposal this session and it’s not in the House or Senate revenue package.”

Environmentalists had earmarked nearly 70 percent of the new revenue for the general fund in the first several years of the tax increase (traditionally the tax paid for storm water clean up.) But neither house bit, and in fact, the new, smaller version, simply goes to storm water clean up.

Environmentalists weren’t just trying to sweeten the proposal by offering up the money for the general fund (the legislature is facing a historic $2.8 billion shortfall), they had also hoped some of the new money would pay for core environmental programs like water quality monitoring, watershed planning, and air quality services that have been cut.

“We came with a list of cuts that needed to be restored and a way to pay for them,” Traisman says. “We’re still fighting. This is not a postscript on the session.”

Between the Senate and House budgets, there are $15 million in cuts to environmental services—more cuts to environmental programs than were in the Governor’s original all-cuts budget. Last year, the general fund budget for natural resource agencies was cut $126.5 million, or 25 percent.

Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-33), a strong advocate for the original bill, says he’s working on compromise proposal to increase the tax to 1.7 percent.




  • Mikos

    It's a bad idea to tax hazardous substances largely for the purpose of balancing the general fund. It makes the general fund dependent on a tax that hopefully provides diminishing returns. Penalizing producers of hazardous substances makes perfect sense, if the penalty is used to create less hazardous susbtances or cleaner energy alternatives. I think Traisman and his pals are over thinking it.

  • hans

    This is a repeat of last year. Chopp keeps a bill alive to show enviro cred and then it dies in the Senate. I don't see the senate taking a tax vote that is not going to fill the budget hole.

  • RejectedEnviro

    This bill could pass in this current form and most likely WCV would still call it an environmental win and give Chopp an award.

  • Refinery Family

    I think that we should consider the long term affects of this tax, my family depends on my income from refining. I am not a higher up or corporate employee, I am a hourly employee which will be the first to be effected by this tax. I highly doubt the refineries in the area are going to keep doing business at a large scale if this tax goes through. Hundreds if not thousands of families will be effected, this is including the hundreds of local contractor companies that services are utilized by refining business. We are in an economic crisis that I do agree but this tax is going to magnify it tenfold. Already I hear of employees putting their resumes out to other states just planning for worst case, if you thing our economy in WA is bad now let's see what happens when unemployment sky rockets and people stop putting money into Washington State's economy. I have been born and raised in WA, my family settled parts of the county I do not want to move my new family (We just had a beautiful baby girl) out of the state because we could not come up with a reasonable way to fix a deficit problem that we as residents did not have any part in sky rocketing. I am a former active duty US Marine and I have served my country with honor, what this country is doing to its working class Americans is inexcusable and we should all be ashamed for letting it happen. In closing if we wish to fix the deficit let's start with those who spend the money and ask them to make the cuts not education, not law enforcement, not the people but instead those who are in control of the money and who I am sure live just a little more extravagantly than they really need to.