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In The News Tribune's Sunday "Insight" section, the gubernatorial candidates square off, sharing their thoughts on the last four years and what to expect in the future.
We're pleased that the paper put to such good use the letters Dino Rossi and Chris Gregoire wrote to AWB members.
A new outlook from the Senate Ways and Means Committee shows the effects of the June revenue forecast. As expected, the hole has deepened to about $2.7 billion.
Ways and Means staff explain their forecast this way:
[It) generally reflects the assumption that future revenue and spending
corresponds to historical trends. However, due to the complexity and potential
volatility surrounding the state's economy and factors impacting state expenditures,
this estimate should be seen as a baseline estimate to inform the Legislature and the
Governor of the current budget outlook and aid in longer term fiscal planning.As they have done in past, it is anticipated that the Governor and the Legislature will
use available reserves and implement spending reductions and/or revenue changes
to balance the 2009-11 budget.
I'd like to see a little more talk now about those "spending reductions and/or revenue changes."
Proving the press corps doesn't take the interim off, Chris Mulick has a nifty piece of investigative reporting in the Tri-City Herald on the loss of "a major economic development score for the state" -- 400 new jobs, and possibly 625 current jobs, to neighboring Idaho. The PI also picked up a version of the piece.
Focusing mostly on intriguing back and forth between project proponents and the Governor's office, the story says a lot about the sometimes chilling effect of our state's legendary permitting process and peculiar environmental politics on our economic competitiveness.
In the early 1980s, Crown Zellerbach began leasing bottom lands along the lower Columbia River stretching from Woodland to Astoria. The company needed a fast-growing tree to pulp at its Wauna pulp mill to replace dwindling supplies of wood chips. It turned to hybrid popular which could be harvested every seven to 10 years like a crop. Today, that mill is owned by Georgia-Pacific and poplar remains part of the mill's wood supply.
With Crown Zellerbach's success, Boise Cascade and Potlatch Corp. began planting hybrid popular in eastern Washington and Oregon along the Columbia River and used the river's plentiful water and wells to give the young trees a drink. What once was desert and dryland now is a lush working forest.
GreenWood, a private equity fund, purchased 35,000 acres of Potlatch's poplar forests and is financing the construction of a $35 million sawmill at Boardman, OR. That mill, when completed in October, will cut poplar into wood for window, door and picture frames, pallets, door cores and veneer for plywood. Poplar, which is a white hardwood, will compete with Ponderosa and Lodgepole pines, both softwoods as a construction material.
The new mill is a shot in the arm for eastern Oregon's sagging economy. In a story in Sunday's (June 29) The Oregonian, Grant (OR) County Commissioner Mark Webb said the upper Columbia and lower Snake rivers run through essentially treeless country and depend on irrigation from the rivers. "Meanwhile, active national forest management is made more difficult by environmental lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits, forestering overstocked forests, tree diseases and wildfires."
Baker County Commissioner Fred Warner told the Portland daily, "It's ironic, isn't it? If there was what I consider a good national forest management plan, I think there are plenty of logs available to run at least one mill in Baker County." That forested county once supported seven.
Poplar grows 15 times faster than westside Douglas Fir and can be harvested every 12 to 15 years. It is also 20% lighter than pine and is breathing life into an industry which has been hit hard by the recent housing market collapse and dwindling timber supplies.
Poplar plantations are also a good way to reduce greenhouse gases because trees absorb carbon dioxide and convert it to life-giving oxygen. Letting forests burn doesn't make sense. It put tons of carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causes respiratory problems like the ones people in northern California are now experiencing, wastes wood people which can use for millions of daily products, and costs taxpayers billions to fight wildfires and restore lands to prevent erosion which clogs streams for salmon, steelhead and trout.
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
Earlier this week, AWB joined with state disability rights organizations in supporting the US House passage of H.R. 3195, an amended, compromise version of the ADA Restoration Act which amends the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. From a joint letter led by AWB and the Governor's Council on Disability Issues and Employment:
People with disabilities are a large, underutilized source of new workers, and a rapidly growing segment of our consumer market. Social justice and our economy are both served when businesses are supported in their efforts to tap into and develop these potentials.
This effort mirrors a similar coalition at the national level between AWB-affiliates like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and nationwide disability rights organizations to update certain portions of the ADA to respond to certain judicial limitations on the act and secure greater protection in employment and public accommodations for disabled individuals. According to NAM President John Engler, "restoring the original intent of the ADA is a practical issue for employers who urgently need qualified workers to fill vacancies - and it's the right thing to do."
Passage of the ADA Restoration Act may have little practical effect in Washington State where, in 2007, the Legislature passed SB 5340 containing many similar protections. But passage of the federal compromise, in addition to being the right thing to do, would have the beneficial side effect of bringing Washington law into greater consistency with federal law.
The Department of Labor & Industries announced yesterday that workers' comp wage and pension benefits will go up a tad over 5% starting July 1st as a result of wage inflation. From the announcement:
Workers currently receiving Washington workers’ compensation wage-replacement or pension benefits will receive a 5.018 percent cost-of-living increase effective Tuesday, July 1. State law requires that benefits be recalculated each year to reflect the change in the state’s average wage from the previous calendar year.
The fact and timing of this announcement underscores some of the difficulty with Washington's labor-friendly wage calculation system. Using wage data from the previous calendar year, and including high wages in industries (think: tech sector) that have comparatively little workers' comp claims experience, drives results that seem entirely out of place.
In other words, at a point right now where consumers are anxious, the state and national economy is slow, unemployment is rising, and companies are forced to consider trimming payrolls, does a 5% increase in benefits seem justified by current economic realities?
Washington already has among the highest workers' comp benefits in the country. And with higher benefits come higher payroll taxes for employers. The tax level for 2009 is being developed now and will be announced this fall. Expect yesterday's announcement to play a role.
Yesterday afternoon, my colleague Chris McCabe and I took in oral arguments at the Temple of Justice in Residents Opposed to Kittitas Turbines v. the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council. The case involves the effort to site a wind farm in the Kittitas Valley between Cle Elum and Ellensburg in response to Washington's mounting push toward alternative energy sources. The AP briefly noted yesterday's arguments here.
Some neighboring landowners object to the project on what appear to be mostly aesthetic grounds, and have appealed to stop the project. Kittitas County objected to the state siting scheme which would preempt its local zoning and land use ordinances, and appealed to stop the project. But because of the strong push in our state energy policy toward renewable and alternative energy sources (with I-937's unfortunate statutory exclusion of hydropower as a renewable resource), AWB has vigorously supported the project through the EFSEC and gubernatorial approval process.
And so AWB, joined by the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Council, filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in this case which can be read here.
Much of yesterday's argument appeared to turn on the justice's interest in whether the Supreme Court actually had jurisdiction to hear the appeal or whether the case had to proceed through a lower court first. This important but seemingly arcane issue somewhat obscured interest in the bottom line that AWB put forward in its amicus brief:
Energy developers are already anxiously awaiting the outcome of this case as an indicator of the regulatory climate for future energy investment in Washington.
That is, with the clear public policy push toward renewables, will the regulatory process to site new facilities be fast, fair, expedited, and efficient, or will it be, like all too many land use processes, slow, cumbersome, and litigious?
According to Bisconti Research, Inc., expanding the nation's energy portfolio will require informing the public about the size of the challenge. Currently, the federal government and the public have dramatically different expectations of how electricity will be supplied 15 years from now.
Nearly three-fourths of the public expect solar energy to be a major source of electricity and 65% believe wind will play a significant role in powering America's electricity grid. However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects those sources will provide about 2% of our nation's electricity in 2020--slightly more than they provide today. (AWB has long supported development of all energy sources and has supported siting of wind farms which are under appeal in our state).
The public placed coal last, with only 14% expecting it to be a major source in 15 years. Coal is the fuel which supplies over half of our electricity today and will supply 58% in 2030 even if we bring all of the alternatives sources such as wind and biomass on line at that time.
The disconnect is 84% of Americans strongly support a "carbon-fee" mix of options to generate electricity. Expectations and reality are like trains speeding by one another in the darkness of the night.
As for nuclear power, which like hydro, produces no greenhouse gases, three-quarters of Americans associate nuclear energy with clean-air benefits and 63% favor nuclear energy to produce electricity.
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
The revenue department's recent release of the annual fComparative State/Local Taxes data book gave the Spokesman-Review's Rich Roesler plenty of fodder for a good tax story today. The department relies on Census Data for interstate comparisons. That's generally considered the safest, most reliable source, but it has one large disadvantage: There's a substantial time lag. The new report covers 2006 tax collections, before the recessionary slide.
Roesler gets to the bottom line in a hurry.
...total state and local taxes in Washington are actually a bit below the national average. When taxes are weighed against personal income, Washington came in 28th highest among the states. Idaho came in 29th. (All the numbers are from 2006 data.)
... To be sure, there are some wince-inducing standouts: Washington's high gas tax, for example. The liquor tax is among the highest in the nation and, at about $2.03 per pack, Washington has the fourth-highest cigarette tax.
But the data suggests that even the state's property taxes compared to average income are relatively modest: Washington ranks 29th on that measure. Idaho was 30th.
Continue reading "Talking Taxes - About Average Burden ... and More" »
AWB President Don Brunell's column today in the Vancouver Columbian expands upon the US Supreme Court's June 19th decision invalidating California's restriction on employer communications about labor unions, something we blogged about here.
The bottom line is the significance of the decision here in Washington State:
The high court’s ruling should be the final stake in the heart of a similar union-backed proposal here in Washington. Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire took the issue off the table last legislative session pending the outcome of the California case.
...
Unions in our state are expected to launch a campaign between now and the 2009 legislation session to convince legislators that their proposal is different than California’s debunked law. But lawmakers should not waste their time or taxpayers’ money on this proposal. The Supreme Court’s decision has clearly put an end to Washington’s employer gag rule.
