Caffeinated news & gossip. Your daily Morning Fizz.
1) A pilot project, pushed by city council member Bruce Harrell, to put body cameras on police officers is moving forward. Yesterday, council staffers outlined the details of the new proposal, which would involve two 90-day stages. In the first stage, patrol officers in cars would wear the cameras; in the second, beat officers in the West Precinct would wear them.
The Seattle Police Department raised a number of objections to the pilot project, including the fact that the demo may be subject to union negotiations, and the fact that state law requires the consent of all parties being audibly recorded.
While the pilot project will still be subject to collective bargaining, the new proposal gets around the second concern by requiring that the cameras’ audio recording feature be turned off; regular dashboard cameras, which are exempt from the state consent law.
2) Seattle-area state house Rep. Reuven Carlyle (D-36, Queen Anne, Ballard) is serving notice to the 567 tax exemptions enshrined in the state budget (they’re worth about $6 billion).
That doesn’t mean he thinks tax exemptions are uniformly bad. But his legislation, he says, would give the legislature an “analytical tool” to at least pass judgment. “Figuring out if a tax break is working,” Carlyle says, “is not a partisan question, it’s an analytical one.” Carlyle wants to know “if the dollars being used are achieving the goal.”
Carlyle says his legislation (it’s not drafted yet) would do two things: 1) sunset all 567 tax breaks and 2) institute an objective, mathematical formula for analyzing tax breaks to see if the return on investment is actually worth it. Carlyle says while there are some metrics out there, such as jobs, legislators currently have no way of doing the apples to apples math on dollars spent vs. dollars gained.
By sunsetting all exemptions and giving legislators an objective measuring stick, Carlyle wants to force tax breaks to undergo the same democratic test that budget expenditures go through—a yea or nay vote during budget deliberations. “Exemptions should be looked at with the same rigor as expenditures,” he says.
With Tim Eyman’s two-thirds rule in place, repealing tax loopholes currently takes a two-thirds vote because doing so is seen as a tax increase. But by putting sunset dates on them and then viewing exemptions as budget expenditures, Carlyle hopes to set up a more democratic way to have at them.
“When people voted for 1053 [Eyman's two-thirds rule],” Carlyle says, “they didn’t realize they were putting exemptions in place for perpetuity.”
If you feel like you are experiencing deja vu, you are: Carlyle pitched this idea in the 2011 session as well. It didn’t go anywhere. Fizz, however, hears Carlyle is getting more traction on the idea this year.
3) Speaking of picking and choosing tax loopholes, the student government at UW, the Associated Students of UW, or ASUW, is holding a press conference this morning to hype their budget recommendations for funding higher education in the face of the $2 billion shortfall in Olympia.
One of their suggestions: Eliminate the the B&O tax exemption for research and development companies and eliminate the deduction R&D companies get on purchasing equipment.
Well, at least eliminate those breaks for the companies with more than 250 employees. The students want to keep the loophole in place for small R&D companies.
Their other proposals include allowing the UW to diversify its endowment investments and allowing local communities to have property tax levies—capped at 10 to fifteen cents per $1,000—to help fund local community colleges.
4) The city council made clear yesterday morning that they don’t plan to implement a proposal by Mayor Mike McGinn to merge the Office of Housing and the Office of Economic Development, eliminating positions in the housing office including its director, Rick Hooper, and the department’s media relations manager. The move—which OED director Steve Johnson said would end the “compartmentalization” of housing and job services into two city divisions—would have saved around $338,000.
Council members have been skeptical about the proposed merger, noting that the housing office had no say in the decision, and pointing out that Hooper, with 30 years at the housing office, has more experience in the office than any other OH employee. “OH has played no role in this particular presentation to council members, and I find that kind of fascinating from a communications standpoint,” city council member Sally Clark said at a budget meeting last month.
As of yesterday, central staffer Traci Ratzliff told the council, “We have a proposal that the council staff and the central budget office are comfortable with that would in fact result in staffing efficiencies that are comparable to what the mayor had proposed” by combining the two offices.
5) Also as part of its budget conversation yesterday morning, the city council also discussed legislation that would make two significant changes at Seattle Public Utilities. The first change would lower the amount by which water rates will go up next year—from the 9.3 percent average increase SPU proposed to 8.7 percent. Additionally, the city would expand eligibility for SPU’s emergency water assistance program from households at 125 percent of the federal poverty line to those making 70 percent of the statewide median.
The change would roughly double the number of people who are eligible for once-yearly emergency help paying their water bills. However, it isn’t likely to have much of a financial impact on the city; currently, only about 18 percent of those who are eligible for water assistance actually use it.
6) Former US Rep. Dave Reichert challenger Darcy Burner, a onetime Microsoft program manager who’s morphed into the lefty leader of ProgressiveCongress.Org, will be on KUOW this morning to, according to her Facebook status, “jump back in to swim with the sharks.”
Presumably she’s joining the crowded field that’s navigating the redistricting process and going for either Reichert’s seat again or more likely US Rep. Jay Inslee’s open seat to the northwest.
Last week, Fizz reported that Burner had a poll in the field testing the waters. We have a message in to Burner.
