1. The Senate Democrats weren’t ready to sign off on the version of the historic capital gains tax legislation (SB 5096) that House Democrats passed earlier this week. So the bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. June Robinson (D-38, Everett) and Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Seattle) met with House Finance Committee Chair Rep. Noel Frame (D-36, Seattle) and House Majority Leader Pat Sullivan (D-47, Covington) to hammer out a compromise version.
On Friday evening, Democrats sent the revised version to the Senate. Both of the House’s referendum protections remain intact in this new version: The Democrats preserved language that says the tax is “necessary” for the government to function and dedicated the first $500 million in revenues from the tax to fund the Education Legacy Trust Account, which locks in the “necessity” clause (under the state constitution, education is the “paramount duty” of the state). Any excess revenue from the tax will be dedicated to an account that funds public school construction.
The new tax is expected to bring in about $445 million during the 2021-23 biennium, $981 million in the 2023-25 biennium, and $1.06 billion between 2025 and 2027.
The bill now includes a new tax deduction for people who donate to charity—a GOP idea that had not made it into any version of the bill until now.
After the meeting, Pedersen told PubliCola his Democratic colleagues added the deduction to get enough votes to pass the bill, saying, “Now it looks like we will be able to get it through both chambers.”
2. After more than a year of negotiations, the Seattle City Council’s central staff—a group of about 30 legal, economic, and policy wonks who draft and analyze legislation for the council—have joined the city’s PROTEC17 union.
Among other guarantees, their new contract increases their pay retroactively for 2019, 2020, and 2021 by 4 percent, 3.6 percent, and 2.9 percent, respectively, and bumps up the minimum maximum pay for their positions by the same percentage. Going forward, the minimum pay for a central staffer will be $42.20 an hour, or $87,776, and salaries will max out at $157,060.
3. Last week, mayoral candidate Andrew Grant Houston subtly tweaked one of his competitors, Chief Seattle Club director Colleen Echohawk, for supporting a proposed charter amendment on homelessness sponsored by a group started by former council member Tim Burgess, Compassion Seattle.
“A few people have asked, so we wanted to clarify that, no, Ace has never been formally or informally involved with the organization Compassion Seattle. We cannot speak for other candidates,” Houston tweeted. In response, a Houston supporter pointed out that the Echohawk campaign had apparently taken down a blog post supporting the initiative.
Asked why they took down the blog post, an Echohawk campaign spokesperson responded that the statement featured in the blog post is “all over social media and we’re hosting it on our Adobe Document cloud.” (True.) “So yes, the answer is we had it up on the blog, but took it down because we decided as a campaign to focus communications on social media as it is much more accessible and more people engage with the campaigns social accounts.”
The Chief Seattle Club works to shelter and house homeless Native people in Seattle. Echohawk’s campaign tweeted and did a Facebook post linking the full statement on April 3.
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