Category: State of Washington

homelessness, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell, State of Washington

Homelessness Authority Rolls Out 2023 Budget and Five-Year Plan to Shelter and House 62,000
Slide from KCRHA presentation: More than 62,000 people in King County experienced homelessness at least once in 2022.
Source: King County Regional Homelessness Authority Five-Year Plan Presentation

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority released the agency’s 2023 budget this week along with a long-awaited five-year plan that agency director Marc Dones said will put the region on a path toward sheltering, then housing, tens of thousands of people over the next several years. But some elements of the road map remain unclear, including how the authority plans to fund its ambitious plans.

The budget KCHRA presented to its implementation and governing boards this week (and which the governing board approved unanimously on Thursday) adds up to $253 million. Much of that total, however, consists of pass-through funds, such as $28 million for the Housing and Essential Needs assistance program for people with disabilities, one-time federal COVID relief funding, and leftover money from this year’s budget.

The budget also includes more than $49 million in grants from the state to resolve encampments in state-owned highway rights-of-way, plus $1.2 million the Seattle City Council added to its KCRHA budget contribution this year to move encampment outreach from the city’s HOPE team to the homelessness authority.

The primary funding sources for the KCHRA are the city of Seattle and King County, which both declined to fund most of the KCRHA’s big budget requests this year. To add services, the authority has turned to funds that comes with strings attached—like the $49 million state contribution for highway cleanup, or a $5 million donation from downtown businesses for cleaning up encampments downtown.

“There’s really not a lot of discretion in our budget, because we’re funded by Seattle and King County. So how are we going to get to a place where we actually have a revenue stream that we can use in our way that we want to use it that implements that five year plan and that vision?”—KCRHA implementation board member John Chelminiak

This year’s legislative session could offer new revenue sources—this week, Gov. Jay Inslee said he would seek voter approval to spend $4 billion to build or preserve about 10,000 affordable housing units statewide—but the outcome of such a vote is far from certain, and it’s unclear how much of that funding would end up going toward homelessness in King County.

“There’s really not a lot of discretion in our budget, because we’re funded by Seattle and King County,” implementation board member (and former Bellevue councilmember) John Chelminiak said Wednesday. “And they’re basically telling us, as you would expect them to, how to spend the money that they’re allocating to us. So how are we going to get to a place where we actually have a revenue stream that we can use in our way that we want to use it that implements that five year plan and that vision?”

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell raised similar questions at the agency’s governing board meeting the following day. (The implementation board, made up of stakeholders and people with lived experience of homelessness from around the region, is responsible for making decisions that the governing board, which includes elected officials, is supposed to adopt.) The agency’s ambitious five-year plan, Harrell noted, is “going to come with a price tag, and … we’re going to have to have that conversation” about new sources of funding.

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The KCRHA plans to release the full details of that plan between now and January, when each board will meet again. A PowerPoint presentation about the plan focused on seven broad goals (among them: “dramatically reducing unsheltered homelessness,” ending homelessness among families, youth, and young adults, and restructuring the homeless service system) but contained few details about how the KCRHA plans to achieve them.

One area of ongoing debate is how much effort the agency should focus on getting people into shelter (“temporary housing”) versus permanent housing. While the Housing Command Center, spearheaded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, is focused on moving people living unsheltered downtown into permanently housing quickly, the KCRHA now estimates that temporary housing will make up about 43 percent of the region’s need over the next five years.

The KCRHA now estimates it will need to find temporary shelter for 23,000 people a year, along with 48,000 permanent housing units, and that the gap between the existing system and the current need amounts to about 19,000 temporary beds and more than 45,000 permanent homes.

At Wednesday’s implementation board meeting, Chelminiak said that unless the authority can show it’s reducing the number of people on the streets, “I don’t think anyone is going to give us any money to spend.” But Sara Rankin, a Seattle University professor and longtime advocate for people experiencing homelessness, said it was more important to offer people meaningful, lasting places to go than “prioritize expediency and the fastest, cheapest ways of moving people out of sight without any long-term sense of what’s going to happen to them.”

The need for both housing and temporary shelter, according to the KCRHA, has grown dramatically. According to the five-year plan presentation‚ 62,000 people in King County were homeless at some point in 2022—a 50 percent increase from an estimated 40,000 who were homeless at some point last year. According to a KCRHA spokeswoman, the 62,000 figure is “the number that the state Department of Commerce is using for the housing modeling that they’re doing for the state and for King County.”

PubliCola has reached out to Commerce for more information and we should have an update Monday.

The KCRHA now estimates it will need to find temporary shelter for 23,000 people a year, along with 48,000 permanent housing units, and that the gap between the existing system and the current need amounts to about 19,000 temporary beds and more than 45,000 permanent homes.

Elections, State of Washington

PubliCola Questions: Secretary of State Candidate Julie Anderson

By Erica C. Barnett

The Secretary of State has historically been a mostly administrative position; the primary duties of the office are to oversee and certify elections, manage the state’s physical and digital archives, and register corporations and nonprofits. In recent years, though—perhaps you’ve noticed—the mundane job of overseeing elections has become fiercely contested ground.

Despite Washington’s blue-state status, we’re still susceptible to disinformation and misinformation campaigns that threaten to erode voters’ trust in the entire voting system. Cyberattacks are becoming more aggressive and sophisticated, forcing the secretary of state’s office to keep up with evolving technology, and even benign changes to elections, like moving local races to even-year elections and implementing ranked-choice voting or other alternative systems, require a level of technical knowledge unheard of even 20 years ago.

In other words, it’s a good time to pay attention to who’s running for secretary of state. Incumbent Steve Hobbs, a longtime state legislator and moderate Democrat appointed to the job last year, says his military background (he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Washington Army National Guard), on-the-job education, and enthusiasm for innovation has earned him a full term; if elected, he would be the first Democrat elected the position in more than 60 years. Challenger Julie Anderson, the Pierce County auditor, says her years of experience as a local election official makes her a better fit; she’s running without a party label for a position she believes should be above partisan politics.

PubliCola spoke to both candidates for secretary of state earlier this month.

PubliCola (ECB): Running as a nonpartisan candidate has been a big part of your campaign. What risk do you see in the fact that this position is technically partisan, and if you’re elected, how will your lack of partisanship be reflected in the way you run the office?

Julie Anderson (JA): A good portion of the reason I’m running as a nonpartisan is personal. We’ve had two notable secretaries of state who did the same thing I’m doing—coming up through the ranks [of election officials] to hold the office. And they were both Republicans, and I believe did a good job and made decisions with integrity. So the obvious question is, what’s the problem, Anderson? The problem is, as Kim [Wyman] saw on her way out, one of her last decisions as secretary was to support a proposal to make the office nonpartisan. So clearly, she saw that partisanship was a distraction because hyper-polarization and partisanship has become more extreme and more influential in how decisions are made.

I see the same thing now. I have been a nonpartisan auditor in Pierce County for nearly 13 years. Our voters made it that way by a change to our city charter because they believed that their chief election administrator should be nonpartisan, and that has really benefited me and my ability to earn trust with both political parties. And it certainly has freed me of awkward or stressful situations where I’m expected to participate in party politics.

“What I’m excited about, and where my election experience comes into play, is that we need to start looking at alternatives to signatures. Young people haven’t had the same opportunities to perfect a signature though repetition, so they tend to sign things different ways. It’s also important for adults with disabilities.”

ECB: Do you think this position should ultimately be elected or appointed?

JA: I think we should look toward other international models of appointment, but let me be quick to say: Not the kind of political appointments we currently are experiencing, but one step at a time. My goal is to hold the office as a nonpartisan, get some breathing room, do a good job, build trust, and if the state legislature would like to start a conversation about a constitutional amendment to create a appointment process, I’m open to that and they would find a willing partner in me.

ECB: You’ve criticized the incumbent for a lack of experience in election administration. Can you give me an example of a scenario where your own experience running elections for Pierce County would make you better prepared than him?

JA: Having an understanding of the impact and capacity of local county administrators when you’re thinking of new programs and initiatives, understanding the constraints and capacity of county elections officials, and having a good rapport with them, is extremely important.

I also understand the technical systems that we use. Votewa.gov [the state’s voter information portal] is a very powerful tool that I was involved in creating—I was on the steering committee building that, creating the parameters and the minimum deliverables in that whole IT project and helping it go online.

Another dimension of practical experience is public records. I’ve been managing documents, indexing them, and making them publicly accessible for 13 years as the county auditor and it’s something I feel very passionate about. The Washington state archives were the second in the world to have a digital archive program, but since then, we’ve failed to keep up the pace of records. Local government and state government have created a huge number of records that are digital-native—what are we doing to prepare for the myriad of different types of formats and ingesting those in a n efficient way at the highest volume and turning around and indexing in those in a way that they’re accessible to the public?

All of the records that were created during the latest redistricting process, those GIS files and Census files were highly interactive. That’s a public record that is going to reside in the state archives. Is it being preserved as a flat file or is it interactive and preserved so that it’s most useful to the public? Those are the kind of questions I want to dive into, in addition to playing catchup on the paper files that local government keeps sending up the food chain.

We’ve also got regional archives, in addition to the new state library that is being built. Those regional archives and the Sand Point National Archives all have buildings that are less than adequate for what they’re doing, especially when you’re looking about paper records. I want to do an assessment of all those facilities to make sure that we are able to preserves properly all the historic records that we have.

ECB: If you’re elected, what would you do to combat disinformation campaigns by foreign and partisan actors? Have you run into disinformation campaigns at Pierce County, and if so, how did you combat them?

JA: It’s a problem across the state, and we’re not exempt from it. I think that everything that is happening in battleground states rolls like a tidal wave over into Washington. We already work with federal agencies to help them detect election misinformation and disinformation on election nights.

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I would improve civic education, and there are some great groups under the superintendent of public instruction that are working hard on that. I would join forces with them and find out what their best practices are. I would be fully engaged with the social studies teachers in high school, as well as community groups who have a role in civic education. I would also lean into organizations that are focused on critical thinking and media literacy.

ECB: What cybersecurity system improvements need to be made to ensure that all of the information under the purview of the Secretary of State is protected from data breaches or similar threats?

There have been no breaches that I’m aware of, and certainly no breaches of voting systems in Washington state. They have been scanned, yes, have they been probed, they have been subjected to denial of service attacks. We work with our Homeland Security partners and all the cyber information security officers in each county to continuously monitor our firewalls, and Homeland Security notifies us instantaneously if there’s a vulnerability and we get on it and patch it.

What I would do is pay more attention to county governments, which doesn’t necessarily mean the election offices. Elections offices depend on county information and IT staff to support their security. We do things like absolutely use two-factor authentication, absolutely make sure we’re monitoring data, but when it comes to the desktops that we use, when it comes to our physical security, that’s all at the county level.

Penetration testing is the thing that you do to test your system security, and right now Homeland Security has about an 18-month waiting period to make sure you get pen tested. And so I’m going got do an audit to see which counties have been pen tested and get all the counties on a schedule to do pen testing. I also want to make sure every county is doing an air gap test so we know that the system is not only connected to the internet, it can’t be probed or penetrated by a cellular device or by a Wi-Fi device.

ECB: What would you do to reduce racial disparities in ballot rejections? Are there better ways to track ballots or inform voters when their ballots have been rejected?

JA: I suspect that there are other things in elections that have the same disparate impacts, whether it is completing a registration or filing for office. I’m super happy that the legislature provided funding to the University of Washington to start collecting election data so that we can be looking at this holistically and geographically. We need to make sure that when we’re sending out those cure notices [so voters can make sure an improperly rejected ballot is counted], or we’re sending instructions to voters to ensure that their vote is counted, that they’re easily understandable. I would do usability testing, which is kind of like a focus group where you get randomly selected participants and see how they interact with your materials and test whether it is easily understood and actionable.

What I’m excited about, and where my election experience comes into play, is that we need to start looking at alternatives to signatures. Young people haven’t had the same opportunities to perfect a signature though repetition, so they tend to sign things different ways. It’s also important for adults with disabilities. I don’t have a solution, but I know that the commercial sector has found solutions in this digital age. It’s not going to replace signatures. We’re going to do what we always have done, which is create alternatives so that voters can choose what’s best for them and allow it to migrate over time.

“Consolidating elections would focus voters, but there are a lot of downsides that really concern me. I can tell you that every county auditor has to go begging and scraping to their county council to fund their programs, and county councils that are economically distressed are going to say, ‘You’re only funding elections every other year—why should I fund a year-round program?'”

ECB: What would you do to increase voter turnout, especially in non-Presidential election years?

JA: Voter turnout is very cyclical, and it’s the very lowest in local elections following a Presidential election. There’s not as much money being spent, but also there’s a lack of engagement and stickiness between the electorate and local government, I really want to help locate governments get local voters more engaged in their local elections. The secretary of state’s office can make it easier for [local elections offices] by helping  get into this cadence of boosting people’s awareness of those local off-year elections. That can help, but it’s going to require everybody grabbing an oar and pulling in the same direction.

ECB: Can you give me an example of what would that look like in practice, and how you would go beyond standard get-out-the-vote campaigns?

JA: I like the idea of pooling philanthropy dollars with government dollars and then granting them out through the secretary of state’s office, in a very neutral fashion, to local organizations and individuals who know their community the best and will use those funds for turnout. The strategies are going to be very different among different populations. It’s the local community members who know what’s going to be most effective. Our job would be making sure that our outreach campaigns are politically neutral and are using best practices and are low-barrier.

ECB: Would moving all local elections to even years improve turnout and engagement, as advocates for eliminating odd-year elections have argued?

JA: Consolidating elections would focus voters, but there are a lot of downsides that really concern me. I can tell you that every county auditor has to go begging and scraping to their county council to fund their programs, and county councils that are economically distressed are going to say, “You’re only funding elections every other year—why should I fund a year-round program?” The other problem is that the way that we keep voters engaged is by constantly mailing things to voters, and if they don’t respond or keep getting returned, we can get them back in active status. If we’re only voting every two years, given that 10 percent of the population moves every year, we’re going to be in a world of trouble.

 

Elections, State of Washington

PubliCola Questions: Secretary of State Steve Hobbs

Steve Hobbs Voter Guide image

By Erica C. Barnett

The Secretary of State has historically been a largely administrative position; the primary duties of the office are to oversee and certify elections, manage the state’s physical and digital archives, and register corporations and nonprofits. In recent years, though—perhaps you’ve noticed—the mundane job of overseeing elections has become fiercely contested ground.

Despite Washington’s blue-state status, we’re still susceptible to disinformation and misinformation campaigns that threaten to erode voters’ trust in the voting system and election outcomes. Cyberattacks are becoming more aggressive and sophisticated, forcing the secretary of state’s office to keep up with evolving technology, and even benign changes, like moving local races to even-year elections and implementing alternative voting systems like ranked-choice voting, require a level of technical knowledge unheard of even 20 years ago.

In other words, it’s a good time to pay attention to who’s running for secretary of state.

Incumbent Steve Hobbs, a longtime state legislator and moderate Democrat appointed to the job by Gov. Jay Inslee last year, says his military background (he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Washington Army National Guard), on-the-job experience, and enthusiasm for innovation has earned him a full term; if elected, he would be the first Democrat elected the position in more than 60 years. Challenger Julie Anderson, the Pierce County auditor, says her years of experience as a local election official makes her a better fit; she’s running without a party label for a position she believes should be above partisan politics.

PubliCola spoke to both candidates for secretary of state earlier this month.

PubliCola (ECB): You were appointed to this job a year ago and don’t have any prior experience overseeing an elections office, which is something your opponent has brought up on the campaign trail. What kind of learning curve did you have, and do you think your experience so far qualifies you for this position?

Steve Hobbs: (SH): There was really no learning curve—hardly any. Because of my leadership experience from being in the military and managing large organizations, plus 15 years in the state legislature, serving the National Security Agency, being a public affairs officer, and having graduated from the various Department of Defense schools that study strategic threats and information warfare, it was easy to step into the job. The only thing I had to learn a little bit about was the other functions of state government. I knew about corporations, charities, and nonprofits, because I interacted with them before. But I hadn’t interacted a lot with [the] state legacy [division], which is basically our history of our state. So that was really exciting, kind of diving into there and seeing if we can take it in a new direction and talk to different people that affected the history of our state.

“When you go to the state level, you’re overseeing different counties and assisting in the process of elections. We’re doing the certification. We’re assisting with the outreach. And on top of that, the position of Secretary of State has evolved [to include] the security of our elections and combating misinformation, and that’s something that [my opponent] Julie [Anderson] does not have.”

We have state library services in our state institutions—our prisons and our state hospitals. So I wanted to know, can we use this facility and the people in it as a way to help with rehabilitation and help prepare those who are incarcerated for life outside. And so we’re looking at things like increasing the number of people [working] in those libraries, and providing an opportunity for the incarcerated to learn skills to tell their story. So for example, we are looking at doing a prison podcast very similar to “Ear Hustle” in the California penal system, I would like to start a pilot project in Purdy [the women’s prison in Gig Harbor], because I don’t think there is a women’s prison podcast.

And then I would like to bring in other items to the library’s besides movies and books and music. I’m a big nerd. I don’t hide it. I’ve got strong ties to the tabletop gaming industry here in the state of Washington, and I’d like to have a games library [in prisons], and I would like to see if we can have therapy sessions in there. There’s this nonprofit called Game to Grow. They use [role-playing games] as a form of therapy for kids with autism and developmental disabilities, and they were talking about doing this with veterans for PTSD. Maybe we can do that in our state institutions. Why not? If it’s going to help people, let’s try to help people with it. So yeah, I’m really excited about this. And we got a bunch of new books, because some of the books are really old.

ECB:  Your opponent says she has more experience than you as an election administrator. How do you respond to that, and can you give me an example of something you’ve learned on the job?

SH: It’s kind of apples and oranges when you go to the state level, because you’re not running an election, you’re overseeing different counties and assisting in the process of elections. We’re doing the certification. We’re assisting with the outreach. And on top of that, the position of Secretary of State has evolved [to include] the security of our elections and combating misinformation, and that’s something that Julie does not have.

This year alone, we had to face three very sophisticated disinformation campaigns and a cyber threat, and you don’t get that at [the county] level. And you have to maneuver with the legislature to get your budgets and policies passed. So I understand she does have the experience at the county level that I don’t have, but she doesn’t have the experience that I have at the statewide level and at the experience of combating these outside threats that are threatening our elections.

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ECB: What have you done or will you do to address the kind direct misinformation or disinformation campaigns that now routinely occur during elections?

SH: We have three ways to attack it. Number one is just reacting to a misinformation campaign the best we can—reaching out to our partners, reaching out on social media platforms, to correct the record. Two is a public service campaign, or information campaign, educating the voters about the process of elections. We have done such an awesome job, both county auditors and secretaries of state across the United States, telling people hey, don’t forget to vote.

What we have done a bad job on is talking about what happens before you get the ballot, and after you get the ballot and you submit it. Simple things like, hey, did you know that every signature is checked? Did you know that you can actually go to the election center in any county office auditor’s office, and you can see the process, you can see the ballots coming in, you can see the balance being counted? Did you know the tabulation machines that actually count the ballots are not connected to the internet, and you can’t hack into them? The average citizen doesn’t know about that. And because of that, these false narratives have been able to take hold because there’s nothing to counter it.

And then the other part is educating young people before they become voting age. A lot of them are sophisticated, and that’s great, because they can identify disinformation better than we can, but we trying to look at different ways to engage them. People my age and older will typically retweet or reshare Facebook posts without taking the time to find out, who is this person? Is this message real?

We have launched our Vote with Confidence campaign, which is informing the public about how elections are run [through ads on radio, TV and social media]. It’s all part of the effort to inform the voters this is going to take this is long term because 35 percent of Washingtonians have doubts about the election, according to a KING 5 poll. That’s a big hill to climb.

ECB: As you know, there are racial and other disparities in which ballots get rejected. Are there better ways to track ballots or inform voters when their ballots have been rejected so their votes can be counted?

SH: The only time we see curing–getting people to sign their ballot or re-signing it if the signature has changed—is usually during close elections, where both sides’ campaigns and usually the parties are involved, and they’re getting people out there to sign those forms by going door to door. There’s got to be a better way.

“I have Republican endorsements and Democratic endorsements. And I’ve been endorsed by the Association of Washington Business and by the Washington State Labor Council. So I love how I’m being attacked for being a partisan, but I’ve operated in a bipartisan manner.”

We have to do two things. One is we have to study why this is happening. And the other thing is, maybe we can lean forward and start doing some things now. And so we are right now in the process [of developing a system]—it will not be operational until next year—which will text the voter that their ballot has been rejected. Because right now, you can either go online to find out, or you’re going to get a letter in the mail, which is highly inefficient, and maybe a phone call. And a lot of this happens after election night at 8pm. So wouldn’t it be nice to get a text message right away, the moment your ballot is rejected, because you’ve forgotten to sign the ballot, or you didn’t sign because English is not your first language?

ECB: What have you done to improve language access in other areas, such as informing voters about elections before they vote?

SH: Language access is definitely an issue, because the only way you get voter guides out there [in languages other than English] is, you have to reach a minimum threshold in a particular county. So for example, Skagit County has a large Hispanic population, but because they didn’t reach the population threshold, you don’t have the voters’ guide going out there in Spanish, mostly because the county commissioners are not supportive.

What I would like to do that is a combination of things. One is trying to get more money in the legislature to provide funding to these counties so they can put out those guides, because a lot of it is driven by money. The other thing we’ve done is, I’ve created a department to do more voter outreach and education. I’m mirroring what is happening in King County under [Elections Director] Julie Wise, which is the trusted messenger program, where we hire people from a community that knows the language, that knows the culture, that can help us do the outreach. Now, I can’t hire enough people to do this. So we also have to team up with organizations in various communities.

ECB: Your opponent is running as a nonpartisan and has said the secretary of state should be a nonpartisan office. How do you respond to that, and what does it mean to you to run as a Democrat for this position? And should this position even be elected?

SH: I do think it should be elected. In terms of partisan or nonpartisan, I don’t think it matters too much. I think at this particular time, people trust Democrats more because what happened on January 6. But the thing is, the only way to change this office to nonpartisan is to pass a bill in the legislature, and they’re not going to do that the because it’s a two-party system. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Secretary of State Steve Hobbs” →

State of Washington, Taxes, Transportation

Toll Revenue Projections Plummet for Costly Waterfront Tunnel as Drivers Stay Away

By Erica C. Barnett

Revenues from tolls on the SR 99 tunnel, which replaced the Alaskan Way Viaduct on the downtown Seattle waterfront, are coming in much lower than the state Department of Transportation assumptions, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future, the state treasury department told the Washington State Transportation Commission this week. Deputy state treasurer Jason Richter told the commission that the new projections likely represent a “permanent reduction” in toll revenues, which pay for construction debt, ongoing maintenance, replacement and repair costs, and a loan from the state’s motor vehicle account.

In May of this year, for example, the state collected just under $5.7 million from tunnel tolls, about $3 million less than projected last year. That trend extends into future projections, which show a shortfall ranging from around 16 percent over the latter half of the 2020s to 30 percent or more in the future. In some years, according to the latest projections , toll revenues won’t be enough to cover debt service on the $3.4 billion tunnel and waterfront roadway project. By 2026, the projections show the tunnel project about $2.5 million in the red, and “then the difference starts to climb at a pretty uncomfortable clip,” Richter said, with a cumulative negative balance of more than $200 million projected 25 years out.

The state can make up for some of the shortfall, Richter told the WSTC, “but I’m suspicious that that’s not going to be sufficient to cover the entirety of this issue, given that the shortfall in a lot of years is equal to roughly a third of the revenue coming in.”

The COVID pandemic had unprecedented impacts on traffic into and through downtown Seattle, changing commute patterns and reducing the number of cars on every road. During 2020, the number of people using the tunnel plummeted to less than 40,000 vehicles a day, and that number has not increased much even as other roads, like I-5, have started to approach pre-pandemic traffic levels. Gas prices, which are currently at unprecedented highs, have also caused people to rethink how they get around, combine trips, and avoid unnecessary driving.

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But even before the pandemic and $6 gas prices, people weren’t using the tunnel nearly as much as WSDOT predicted they would; in fact, once tolls went into effect in 2019, the number of vehicles using the tunnel dropped by 28 percent to fewer than 60,000. Contacted by email, WSDOT toll division spokesman Christopher Foster noted that “prior to the pandemic, trafficvolumes in the tolled tunnel were exceeding forecasts,” but both the forecasts and “baseline” tunnel usage are moving targets; while the tunnel was originally justified on the grounds that 130,000 cars would use it every day, the state has continually adjusted its forward-looking projections downward in light of actual traffic volumes.

One of the major reasons people aren’t driving in the tunnel is that there’s no real incentive to use it: If you can from point A to point B quickly and conveniently for free, why would you pay for the privilege? If you’ve driven in the tunnel, you’ve probably noticed that it often feels like an empty highway in the middle of the night—people avoid the tunnel in favor of existing surface streets, including the currently two-lane surface Alaskan Way, which WSDOT is currently widening into yet another highway.

Cary Moon, the founder of the People’s Waterfront Coalition, which advocated against the tunnel, is reluctant to say “I told you so.” But she will say that the data WSDOT used to justify building the tunnel—which initially projected 130,000 vehicles would use the tunnel every day—was “a joke” even before COVID came into the picture.

“Driving alone, especially in the tunnel, is dropping significantly and that’s’ a good trend long term,” Moon said. It’s also “what we knew would happen. … If we had invested in the right infrastructure, can you imagine what we could have done?”

But to WSDOT, despite its stated commitment to sustainability, the best outcome is one in which drivers get back in their cars and start using the tunnel again. The state could continue to boost toll rates, which currently range from $1.20 to $2.70 each way, to make up for lost revenues, and undoubtedly will, but higher tolls tend to lead to more diversion and people making different travel decisions. It’s a delicate balance.

“I think the transportation commission is doing their best to set tolls at a level that covers costs but also doesn’t cause excessive diversion,” Richter told PubliCola. The negative balance in WSDOT’s tunnel account is “cumulatively growing to the point where there’s going to have to be a conversation with legislators, as well as the transportation commission, to come up with a viable way to solve this,” Richter said. In other words, the legislature needs to come up with a solution, and funding, because the tunnel’s financial underpinnings are shaky.

“The bills have to be paid, and I have no doubt they will be paid—it’s going to be a question of, how do we do so without causing harm to the corridor and do so in a sustainable manner?”

 

City Council, Elections, Health, State of Washington

Democrats, Republicans, and “Nonpartisan Party” Candidate Face off for Secretary of State; Council Takes Up Abortion Bills

1. The race for Washington Secretary of State—a position to which no Democrat has been elected since the 1960s—has drawn eight candidates, among them two Republicans, two Democrats (including the appointed incumbent, former state Sen. Steve Hobbs), and four candidates with other affiliations, including Pierce County auditor and “nonpartisan party” candidate Julie Anderson. (One candidate, Tamborine Borelli, is running with an “America First (R)” affiliation).

At a virtual forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Washington last week, five of the eight candidates described what their priorities would be if elected. Three of the five—Hobbs, Anderson, and former Republican state legislator Mark Miloscia—have reported raising more than $50,000.

The other two candidates at the forum were Marquez Tiggs, a Democrat who said he would support in-person voting to increase turnout and require voter IDs at polling stations, and Bob Hagglund, a Republican who said he wants to require voter ID so that “the people who should not be voting don’t get their vote and don’t get their ballots counted.” Borelli, “Union Party” candidate Kurtis Engle, and Republican Keith Waggoner did not participate.

Hobbs and Anderson, the two top fundraisers and likely frontrunners, both emphasized their experience—Hobbs as an expert on disinformation from his training as a member of the US Army National Guard, and Anderson as Pierce County auditor for the past 12 years. Anderson said she would be the first Secretary of State to embrace nonpartisanship. “Political parties do not belong in the Secretary of State’s office,” she said, adding that she would support legislation to make the office officially nonpartisan. Hobbs said it doesn’t matter to him whether the office is partisan or not, because “it’s about the person that’s in the office, not the label.”

Among other claims, Republican Secretary of State candidate Mark Miloscia has argued that “perverts” on the left are “coming after our children,” denouncing abortion rights supporters, and accusing Democrats of “indoctrinating children with the demonic tenants of pagan radicalism.“

The two candidates also differed on the issue of ranked choice voting (Anderson said she supports it as a matter of “local choice,” while Hobbs said it “just adds a new complicated element to elections” and “is vastly unfair to new Americans to come to this country where English is not their first language.” Both agreed that the state should do more to protect the security of elections, although Hobbs emphasized outreach and voter contact, including heightened efforts to reach voters when the signatures on their mail-in ballots are rejected while Anderson proposed a “statewide risk limiting audit” on a single race to test election security.

Since leaving office (and running unsuccessfully for state auditor in 2012 and 2016), Miloscia has been the director of the Family Institute of Washington, where he has written prolifically and conspiratorially about the decline of “traditional values.” Among other claims, Miloscia has argued that “perverts” on the left are “coming after our children,” denouncing abortion rights supporters, and accusing Democrats of “indoctrinating children with the demonic tenants of pagan radicalism.” (Also, he is positively obsessed with drag queens, who he says are tempting children with “lie[s] from the devil.”)

2. The city council will take up three different bills aimed at addressing access to abortion, two of them delayed because one of their sponsors, Councilmember Tammy Morales, contracted COVID.

The first, sponsored by Councilmember Kshama Sawant, aims to turn Seattle into a “sanctuary city” for abortion providers by directing the City Attorney’s Office and police not to cooperate with investigations, subpoenas, or search or arrest warrants by out-of-state authorities seeking to prosecute abortion providers who take refuge in Seattle. “If people break the unjust anti-abortion laws in their own state and believe they will be caught, they can come to Seattle to stave off prosecution,” Sawant said at a Monday afternoon council briefing.

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The legislation also says that if Washington state bans or restricts abortion in the future, the police must make cooperation with other law enforcement authorities among its lowest law-enforcement priorities, along with marijuana-related offenses.

The second, from Morales and Councilmember Lisa Herbold, incorporates a 1993 state law that makes it a gross misdemeanor to interfere with a patient’s access to health care facilities, such as clinics and hospitals that provide abortions, by blocking entrances, disturbing the peace, and harassing or threatening patients or clinic employees. And the third, also sponsored by Morales and Herbold, would prohibit discrimination based on a person’s perceived pregnancy outcomes; for example, an employer could not fire or penalize an employee because the employer believed she had an abortion.

Although both proposals seem likely to pass, they also illustrate the limitations of what blue cities in blue states can do to mitigate the impact of abortion bans nationwide—it’s unlikely, for example, that abortion providers from across the country will resettle in Seattle en masse to avoid pursuit and prosecution by anti-choice judges and law enforcement officials in their home states.

Statewide efforts to fund abortion providers who will be inundated with out-of-state patients would be more impactful, as would restrictions on additional mergers between secular and Catholic hospitals, which not only refuse to provide abortions but often refuse to manage miscarriages in progress or provide tubal ligations or birth control. Earlier this year, a state bill that would have required some transparency when health care systems merge failed to make it out of committee.

Affordability, City Council, homelessness, housing, legislature, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, State of Washington

Harrell Veto of Rent Transparency Bill Stands, JustCare Will Transition to Focus on Highway Encampments

1. The Seattle City Council voted not to overturn Mayor Bruce Harrell’s veto of legislation that would have directed a research university, such as the University of Washington, to collect information from landlords about the size of their units and how much they charge. City Councilmember Alex Pedersen sponsored the proposal because, he said at Tuesday’s meeting, it would help the city “validate [the] affordable benefits of smaller mom and pop landlords,” informing the city’s upcoming Comprehensive Plan rewrite; Councilmember Tammy Morales (District 2) co-sponsored it because she said it would give renters better information to make housing decisions and could ultimately bolster support for rent control.

“This could mean, for tenants, that they finally have the ability to make an informed decision and to make a choice between units when they’re searching for a new home—something that landlords have been able to do with background checks on tenants for decades,” Morales said. “We would finally have concrete data that dispels the illusion that private-market, trickle-down economics is the solution to our affordability crisis.”

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Renters, unlike homeowners, lack access to crucial information to help them make informed housing decision. While home buyers can easily access public information about what a house sold for most recently, the assessed value of adjacent and nearby houses, and (through data maintained and published by the Multiple Listing Service) the average prices of houses in a particular area, renters have to rely on sites like Apartment Finder and Craigslist to get a general idea of local rents. Searches for the “median rent” in Seattle yield numbers that vary by hundreds of dollars, making it impossible to know whether the rent a landlord is charging is reasonable. 

In vetoing the legislation, Harrell argued that the bill would violate landlords’ rights by revealing “proprietary” information.

Overturning a mayoral veto requires a minimum of six council votes; as in the original vote, just five councilmembers supported the legislation this time.

2. JustCare, the COVID-era program that engaged with people living in encampments and moved them into hotel-based shelter, will no longer continue in its previous form. The program, run by the Public Defender Association, ran out of city funding at the end of June. Its new iteration, which will focus exclusively on encampments in state-owned rights-of-way, will be funded using state dollars allocated in a supplemental state budget for shelter and services tied to encampment removals on state-owned property.

“In the sense of a response to the conditions in the specific neighborhoods we served, there is no more JustCare. That era is over – it’s been superseded. The City of Seattle and KCRHA are now in charge of that response.”—Lisa Daugaard, Public Defender Association

The funding is only available to groups that focus on encampments in sites “identified by the department of transportation as a location where individuals residing on the public right-of-way are in specific circumstances or physical locations that expose them to especially or imminently unsafe conditions, including but not limited to active construction zones and risks of landslides.”

By moving its focus to encampments in state rights-of-way, such as highway overpasses, JustCare will lose its geographic, neighborhood-based focus, PDA co-director Daugaard acknowledges. 

“In the sense of a response to the conditions in the specific neighborhoods we served, there is no more JustCare,” Daugaard said. “That era is over – it’s been superseded. The City of Seattle and KCRHA are now in charge of that response.” Continue reading “Harrell Veto of Rent Transparency Bill Stands, JustCare Will Transition to Focus on Highway Encampments” →

legislature, State of Washington, Taxes

Amid Court Battle Over Capital Gains Tax, House Finance Chair Previews Future Reforms
State Rep. Noel Frame (D-36)
State Rep. Noel Frame (D-36)

By Clara Coyote

Following up on last year’s capital gains tax—a major legislative win for progressives during the 2021 session that puts a 7 percent tax on profits greater than $250,000 from the sales of assets, such as stocks and bonds—state Rep. Noel Frame (D-36) has her eye on comprehensive structural change for Washington’s upside-down tax code. The poorest fifth of Washington state residents pay, on average, 16.8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes while the richest 1 percent of Washingtonians pay an average of just 2.4 percent.

A key piece of that larger agenda for Frame, the House finance chair, is a wealth tax; she introduced a version last year,  HB 1406, which the state department of revenue estimated would bring in $2.5 billion a year. Frame passed the bill out of her Finance Committee last year before it stalled in House Appropriations. Frame said she sees the senate version, SB 5426, as this year’s vehicle, and hopes the Senate Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing on the legislation. 

Additionally, Rep. Frame said there will be smaller but meaningful bills during this year’s short (60-day) legislative session to clarify the implementation of existing legislation—for example, refining the 2023 rollout of the Working Families Tax Credit, a program Democrats passed last year, that will provide payments ranging from $300 to $1,200 to low-to-moderate-income people. Frame’s committee may also consider progressive modifications to the existing estate tax, by lowering taxes on small and medium estates while increasing taxes on the largest. This is work that first began with HB 1465, introduced (but not passed) last year.

Frame said that larger, systemic reform is emerge from the work of the multi-year bipartisan Tax Structure Work Group, which Frame chairs. Frame told PubliCola that she hopes to see bills as soon as 2023 refining an anti-displacement property tax exemption proposal meant to protect housing for mid-to-low income Washingtonians. In its final draft, Frame said, the legislation will incorporate feedback from town hall meetings where participants said renters as well as homeowners should benefit from the exemption. Frame said the work group will also figure out the details of her proposed wealth tax. 

Frame believes small businesses also need help. “We have the business and occupation (B&O) tax passed in the 1930s as a temporary measure that never went away,” Frame said. The B&O tax applies to all revenues a business takes in, regardless of whether a business turns a profit. “This disproportionately harms small businesses,” Frame said. “A central goal of the working group is finding a better alternative.”

Frame said she’s well aware that the progressive capital gains tax is already facing a court challenge but said she’s undeterred about moving forward with additional reforms that could draw more lawsuits. “Just because the rich and the powerful will threaten us every single time with a lawsuit doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask them to pay their fair share,” she said. 

Elections, Guest Contributor, State of Washington

A Functional Democracy Requires A Challenge to New Redistricting Maps
Washington State Redistricting Commission adopted state legislative boundaries
Washington State Redistricting Commission-adopted state legislative boundaries

By Andrew Hong and Margot Spindola

Earlier this month, the Washington State Supreme Court declined an opportunity to fix a gross miscarriage of democracy, declining to redraw the state’s political boundaries after the Washington State Redistricting Commission abdicated its authority by submitting their maps a day after the constitutional deadline. With this decision, the supreme court effectively endorsed maps that violate the voting rights of communities of color, turning a blind eye to a process that prioritized partisan advantage over communities’ interest.

Every decade, state and local governments redraw their legislative districts to reflect population shifts revealed by the US Census. The process has the power to reshape the political landscape—granting outsize power to one party, for example—and increase or reduce the power of communities, such as Washington state’s Latino population. This year, the redistricting commission—a hyperpartisan group made up of two Democrats and two Republicans—failed, after hours of closed-door meetings, to reach consensus on new political maps by the November 15 constitutional deadline. Despite this failure, the state supreme court swiftly announced that the maps were fine, disregarding both the contours of the maps themselves and the deeply flawed process that produced them.

This redistricting commission and the courts had a unique opportunity to take in community input and set the boundaries of our democracy in a way that ensures communities’ voices are heard. By that measure, they failed spectacularly.

The court didn’t consider, for example, whether the Commission violated the Open Public Meetings Act when they conducted eleventh-hour negotiations, off camera, to make a decision on a final map plan. Perhaps, they would have considered otherwise if they had seen a memo written by commission staff leaked last week that revealed the commissioners prioritized naked partisan advantage over equitable representation.

Most importantly, the court did not consider how the maps likely violate both state law and the federal Voting Rights Act, by diluting the Latino vote in Yakima County. Amid all the process drama, both the commission and the court failed to consider the impact of these maps on the actual people who live and vote in those districts.

In its effort to remain apolitical, the court gave this two-party commission a political victory: Partisan-driven incumbent protection by way of a voting rights violations for which taxpayers may end up footing the bill in a legal challenge. Throughout this broken process, commissioners ignored requests from communities of color in Western and Central Washington to be kept together to right the wrongs of previous districting failures. And yet the commissioners claimed victory in the name of diversity and representation. When they were called on it, they refused to listen to community input and public testimony.

District maps, as with all government services and entities, should serve the people, not the political establishment. This redistricting commission and the courts had a unique opportunity to take in community input and set the boundaries of our democracy in a way that ensures communities’ voices are heard. By that measure, they failed spectacularly.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Communities of color all across our state, at every level of government, have always been tossed around like a political football. In Seattle, I-5 splits the Chinatown-International District in half. And after its construction, the city zoned the historically Asian-American and Pacific Islander neighborhood with downtown and Pioneer Square—not accounting for the fact that our residential and industry interests more closely align with Beacon Hill and South Seattle. Continue reading “A Functional Democracy Requires A Challenge to New Redistricting Maps” →

Density, homelessness, housing, human services, State of Washington

Inslee Proposes $800 Million Housing, Homelessness Plan
Gov. Inslee’s supplemental budget proposal includes funding for new tiny-house village shelters.

By John Stang

On Wednesday, Gov. Jay Inslee announced $815 million supplemental budget proposal to respond to homelessness across the state. His announcement came one day before King County planned to release a new count of the region’s homeless population, based on data obtained from homeless service providers through a database called the Homeless Management Information System, that is expected to be significantly higher than previous “point in time” counts.

Inslee’s proposal did not include detailed information about how much funding Seattle and King County stood to receive.

While it isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, the Washington Department of Commerce typically divides capital projects in thirds, with one third going to Seattle and King County, one third going to other cities and one third going to rural areas, Inslee spokeswoman Tara Lee told PubliCola. The commerce department would handle more than $700 million of the $815 million package in its capital and operations budgets.

If approved, the package would help build tiny-house villages, provide help for people to pay their utility bills, expand behavioral health facilities for the homeless, and speed up efforts to find places for the homeless living in tents on public right-of-ways.

Inslee announced the package Wednesday at the Copper Pines Habitat For Humanity complex in Ballard, which will include seven three-bedroom units for families making 80 percent or less of Seattle’s median income.

Inslee also announced legislation that would allow what low-rise apartments, split lots, duplexes, and other types of low-impact density on all residential lots within a half-mile of a major transit stop in cities with populations greater than 25,000 people. The legislation would effectively override laws dictating suburban-style single-family development in cities.

“We cannot wait years and decades to get people out of the rain,” Inslee said, adding that the state’s population growth has created a shortage of roughly 250,000 homes. “It is unacceptable to us to have people living under bridges and not have solutions.”

He said the state’s population growth has created a shortage of roughly 250,000 homes in Washington. His proposals addresses a range from the extremely poor to renting families in danger of losing their homes because of rising bills. Inslee said his proposals would build 1,500 new permanent housing units and fund acquisition of existing properties to add another 2,400 shelter beds, tiny house village units, and permanent housing units, including short-term shelter for people living in encampments across the state.

A document outlining Inslee’s proposal estimated that about 30 of every 10,000 state residents were homeless before the pandemic, a number the state believes has increased by about 2 percent. Statewide, 80,000 families said they could soon face eviction or foreclosure, according to the US Census Bureau. Continue reading “Inslee Proposes $800 Million Housing, Homelessness Plan” →

legislature, State of Washington, Taxes, Transit, Transportation

Advocates Say It’s Time to Ditch the Old Transportation Funding Process
Anna Zivarts, Disability Rights Washington

by Leo Brine

Transportation advocates were actually pleased when lawmakers ended the most recent legislative session without passing a new transportation package.

After the transportation committees released their proposed revenue packages late in the session, transportation accessibility groups and environmentalists were disappointed by the outdated investment priorities. Wanting a more equitable transportation package, advocates repeated a line of critique they’ve been making for years: The state needs to find new transportation revenue sources and free up revenue that is otherwise restricted to highway spending.

However, and perhaps because their recommendations have gone unheeded for a decade, a new, more sweeping critique emerged in 2021: It’s time to dump the whole politicized “transportation package” model and create a new framework that assesses and prioritizes the state’s actual transportation needs.

Anna Zivarts, Director of the Disability Mobility Initiative for Disability Rights Washington, said the current system is a “pork model,” where legislators pick projects for their districts rather than investing in projects that make the whole state transportation system function better.

“A transportation system has to work across the state,” she said. “If you have everyone competing, that’s not going to create the best system overall.”

Advocates say lawmakers have too much power over which projects get funded and have political incentivizes to fund major highway expansion projects rather than expand transit services or improve pedestrian infrastructure. Featuring friction over projects, funding, regionalism, mode split, and maintenance versus new construction, the legislative ritual, akin to passing a kidney stone, played out in 2003, 2005, and 2015.

A new, more sweeping critique emerged in 2021: It’s time to dump the whole politicized “transportation package” model and create a new framework that assesses and prioritizes the state’s actual transportation needs.

In April, during the last weeks of the session, the House and Senate transportation committee chairs, Rep. Jake Fey (D-27, Tacoma) and Sen. Steve Hobbs (D-44, Lake Stevens), shared their transportation revenue proposals. The House proposal would have spent $22 billion over 16 years, earmarking the majority of the dollars for highway projects, with about 20 percent going to multimodal projects. The Senate’s proposal would have spent $18 billion over the same period, with less than 10 percent going to multimodal projects.

Leah Missik, transportation policy manager for Climate Solutions, said lawmakers’ proposed investments in multimodal projects were a major step up from previous packages, but “continuously investing in road expansions is certainly not the way we want to go.”

In order to fix the state’s transportation system, Paulo Nunes-Ueno of Front and Centered, a BIPOC environmental group, said, “this package process needs to go.”  Transportation packages never meet people’s needs and are a hodgepodge of project ideas from legislators, he said. Instead, Nunes-Ueno says lawmakers should establish climate, infrastructure, and safety goals, and allocate funding to state and local agencies that would decide how to allocate funding on projects.

Hester Serebrin, policy director for the Transportation Choices Coalition, said politics play too great a role when lawmakers craft transportation packages. She said lawmakers are more likely to invest in large projects, like highway expansions or major road repairs, because they garner more attention than smaller multimodal projects. “This process doesn’t incentivize … projects that help people travel between places,” Serebrin said. “Instead it incentivizes larger, geographically isolated projects.”

Other advocates agree that politics should play less of a role in the state’s transportation system. Vlad Gutman, Climate Solutions’ Washington director, like Nunes-Ueno, wants legislators to devise a set of goals and values for Washington’s transportation infrastructure and allocate funding to state agencies who can come up with projects and programs to accomplish the goals.

In order to fix the state’s transportation system, Paulo Nunes-Ueno said, “this package process needs to go.”  Instead, Nunes-Ueno wants lawmakers to set climate, infrastructure, and safety goals and allocate funding to state and local agencies.

“We need to be selecting projects and investing and designing our transportation system in a sort of objective, metric-based way that also recognizes and inputs the needs of communities and people who are impacted and stakeholders of transportation,” he said.

To do so, he argued, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) should study the needs of the state and select projects based on those needs, “instead of [lawmakers] sort of piecemealing it by selecting projects one at a time,” Gutman said.

This participatory approach to transportation planning doesn’t make sense to Senate Transportation Chair Hobbs. “We’re in a democracy and legislators have a right to say how their districts should be supported by government,” he said.

Continue reading “Advocates Say It’s Time to Ditch the Old Transportation Funding Process” →