LD 24
Education
Problem: In 2022, 26.2% of Washington students failed to meet national grade 4 basic math standards, reflecting a steady decline since 2013 when 13.7% failed this standard. The picture is even worse for basic reading, with 38.5% of students failing that standard in 2022, again showing a steady decline since 2013. Grade 8 Washington students also did poorly, with 36.1% failing math and 28.9 failing reading standards in 2022. Washington Overview WA (nationsreportcard.gov) Many parents are disconnected from the curriculum that their children are being taught. Washington is also facing a severe skilled labor cliff as more and more people in the trades and specialized degree fields retire, with no one to fill their places.
How we can do better: Parents need to be involved in their children’s education, to supervise homework and to support and demand achievement. Washington law and policy should fully enable this involvement, rather than limiting it.
K-12 curriculum should be refocused on English, math, science, and vocational-technical learning. Contracts with administrators and staff should be renegotiated to reward high-performers, ensuring that bright and capable teachers are not lost to more lucrative fields, while demanding accountability and dissuading low performing administrators and staff. Public schools must be strongly supported so that all children receive a sound education in a safe facility. In view of low current performance, parents should be supported if they choose to educate their children in private or charter schools.
Major cell phone manufacturers should be approached to enable a standard parental control feature that parents may choose to utilize that limits device usage time by minors for other than calling and texting. Legislation would be an option but voluntary industry compliance should be possible.
Address the skilled- and educated-labor shortage for electrical, plumbing, and construction trades and healthcare, law enforcement, fire/EMS, and engineering by sponsoring legislation to create a state education and training exchange. The exchange would be primarily funded by employers in need, and would provide low- or no-interest loans to fund vocational-technical, community college, apprenticeship, and state university training and education to develop the necessary skills and credentials. Upon student/trainee graduation, employers that paid in would have priority hiring, and the loans would be forgiven in exchange for a commitment to work a set number of years for those employers. employers (e.g., commercial businesses, unions, trade associations) This program would be limited to high-need fields with a clear path to developing the needed skills and credentials, as opposed to other areas of study that do not fill these needs. Hand-in-hand with this approach, cut back or eliminate subsidy programs that encourage working-age people to stay home and state funding for educational programs that do not fill these high-need areas or otherwise result in living wage employment.
Due to limited capacity, it is difficult for students to enroll in certain high-demand degree programs at our state universities, such as engineering, computer science, and nursing. These programs should be expanded and enrollment priority at both our universities and our community colleges should be provided to Washington residents who will stay after graduation to fill our needs in fields that are in high demand.
State Tax relief
Problem: Particularly in today’s inflationary times, Washington residents are feeling the pinch of state taxes paid by individuals as well as taxes and fees levied on businesses serving the state, which costs are passed on to consumers.
How we can do better: Relief should be provided in at least the following ways:
Washington’s carbon “cap and invest” program should be repealed. It has resulted in our state having amongst the highest gasoline and diesel costs in the country. This hits people in rural areas, such as the Olympic Peninsula, hard given the distances that must be traveled daily for employment and necessary trips such as to the food store and for medical care. It also adds to the costs of groceries and other goods sold in the state, which are typically transported by trucking prior to purchase. The evolution of society from fossil fuel burning to cleaner forms of energy will occur on its own as technology continues to develop and the benefits and cost-effectiveness of alternatives such as hydrogen fuel cell systems become clear. A broad variety of energy generation and distribution technologies should be fostered. Forcing such alternatives before they are “ripe” fails to achieve objectives but costs ordinary working people mightily.
Participation in the State’s long-term care program and the associated payroll taxes should be made optional.
The “excise tax” (income tax) on capital gains should be repealed. It provides a disincentive to entrepreneurs looking to start and grow businesses in the state, something we have enjoyed to date and should not lose. A broad variety of energy generation and distribution technologies should be fostered. Additionally, legislative attempts have already been made to expand this tax to apply to lower thresholds of capital gains income such that it would start to hit everyday people managing their savings.
We also absolutely need to resist legislative attempts to initiate a mileage tax on automobile, truck, and other vehicle travel.
The exemption from sales tax on groceries and certain other classes of goods should be expanded to include prepared foods, clothing, and school supplies. Additionally, periodic sales tax “amnesty days” on all goods would spur business while giving relief to consumers.
Public Safety
Problem: The state is only halfway through undoing disastrous laws adopted to hamstring our police and decriminalize the use of hard drugs. Our communities have difficulty recruiting law enforcement personnel due to laws and policies that are not supportive of law enforcement.
How we can do better:
I applaud the recent initiative that unties the hands of law enforcement to safely pursue and apprehend reasonably suspected criminals, including in cases of property crimes.
Fully fund law enforcement and first responders and embrace that the vast majority are dedicated public service providers that should be appreciated and honored, while holding rare exceptions accountable.
Law enforcement and courts must also be empowered to give users of hard drugs a choice of treatment or incarceration. In either case, individuals sickened by addictive drugs would be provided a chance to break temporarily free of addictive substances, and these individuals should then be encouraged to continue in their recovery. If they remain clean for a year, and have not committed other crimes, their drug possession convictions should be expunged so that they can move on in life. Manufacturers, importers, and distributors of hard drugs must be held legally accountable for the significant harm they cause.
Homelessness, addiction, and mental illness are often intertwined. Effective mental health treatment centers need to be reestablished and expanded so that we can compassionately treat those afflicted with mental illness.
Olympic Peninsula Transportation
Problem: The Olympic Peninsula is served by a limited number of highways that can be treacherous due to the current arrangement of intersections with arterials. Much of the East side of the Peninsula has frequent needs to access the greater Seattle metropolitan area as for medical care, air travel, entertainment and the like. That access has traditionally been most readily obtained via ferry, but our Washington State Ferry system is in shambles.
How we can do better:
Highway transportation funds should be used to enable underpass/overpass exchanges on the Olympic Peninsula including Highways 101 and 104. Our State Ferry system should rehire, to the extent possible, staff that were let go due to COVID mandates; funding should be made available for training and qualifying new staff; and ferry construction dollars should focus on reliability of existing and new vessels as the preeminent concern rather than focusing primarily on the conversion to electric propulsion.
Rural Healthcare
Problem: The Olympic Peninsula is primarily rural and has a fairly extreme shortage of healthcare providers, with those available often being located at a relatively great distance from patients needing their care. Olympic Peninsula hospitals also tend to operate at a deficit due the largest insurers being Medicare and Medicaid, which reimburse at rates significantly less than many private insurers.
How we can do better:
Foster telehealth services for population sites that are far from existing hospitals. Make sure that zoning and building regulations do not impede the siting and operation of satellite clinics. Support living-wage business growth, resulting in a greater percentage of privately insured patients. Improve ferry reliability for accessing specialists in the greater metropolitan Seattle area. Increase the supply of available housing for healthcare workers.
Housing shortage
Problem: The Olympic Peninsula has a shortage of reasonably priced housing. Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA) was adopted to stop sprawl that would cost us our rural environment. But its implementation in some parts of the Peninsula, such as Jefferson County, has resulted in a stranglehold on development. At the same time statewide regulatory barriers to building ever increase, resulting in a longer and costlier construction process. According to the Building Industry Association of Washington, government regulations at all levels account for 23.8% of the final price of a new single-family home and 40.6% of the final project cost for multi-family structures. In 2021, government regulations contributed $141,784 to the median home sales price of $595,732 in Washington. The Real Cost of Regulations In Washington – Building Industry Association of Washington (biaw.com) While some regulation is warranted to ensure residential safety and to protect our environment, the balance has tipped far too heavily from earlier in our state, when a family could readily build a simple house that met their needs using only their skills and without intrusive oversite.
How we can do better:
Amend the GMA so (i) that it becomes mandatory for counties to expand the size of urban growth areas (UGAs), rural village centers, and other local areas of more intense rural development (LAMIRDs) when the developed status of these areas reach 85% or greater of space within these zones, and (ii) increase residential and light commercial development capabilities within LAMIRDs to match those of UGAs.
Provide tax and regulatory exemptions to spur free-market lower-cost housing options, including the installation and maintenance of manufactured home parks, the relocation and renovation of existing houses, and self-help programs such as that run by Habitat For Humanity.
Just as low income seniors are eligible for reduced real estate taxes, landlords that rent to such residents, including mobile home parks, should receive similar exemptions.
State and local regulations and policies that add cost to construction without significant corresponding safety or environmental benefits should be wholesale revised. Statewide pre-approval of low-cost septic alternatives should be adopted for implementation in rural environments that are not subject to the intense degree of development seen in urban areas. Less-costly building techniques, such as modular homes, container homes, and 3D printed homes, should also be approved at the state level.
Legislation that ends up limiting rental housing stock needs to be avoided, and this includes limits on background checks by landlords, eviction moratoriums, and rent control measures.
Living-wage business development
Problem: Traditional industries that provided the economic backbone of the Olympic Peninsula, including timber and fisheries, have been allowed or caused to wither without equivalently robust replacements.
How we can do better: The state legislature must protect and foster existing timber and fisheries businesses in a way that balances environmental protection with the sustained harvesting that is vital to our economy. State law and regulations concerning the hospitality, restaurant and adventure industries should be reviewed to make sure that the tourism trade that is so vital to the more remote areas of the Peninsula is fostered. We also need to support the formation and growth of technology and clean manufacturing businesses on the Peninsula to provide good-paying career jobs while retaining the rural nature of the area and protecting our environment. Although the influx of telecommuters to our region has raised property costs, they also provide a source of talent, energy, and funding that we should embrace to enable the creation and siting of technology businesses here. We should ensure that our local community college system is positioned to partner with industry to provide job training in fields such as CNC machining, 3D printing, software development, and other clean technology applications. Please also refer to the discussion about education above. And we need to ensure that individuals working career-level jobs earn commensurate career-level wages that enable living and raising a family on the Peninsula.
Daycare
Problem: Many two-earner families and single parents require safe and affordable daycare in order to earn a living. Available daycare services are in many instances so expensive as to not make working pencil out, and there is an extreme shortage of daycare services in rural areas such as the Olympic Peninsula.
How we can do better: Tax credits should be provided for small in-home licensed daycares to both lower cost and increase availability.
Homelessness
Problem: Washington State including the Olympic Peninsula has a large and growing population of unsheltered individuals. These individuals often survive in inhumane third-world conditions while negatively impacting surrounding citizens.
How we can do better: For those who are temporarily down on their luck, increasing the supply of reasonably-priced housing and living-wage jobs is the solution. But the majority of unsheltered individuals are sick – either mentally ill, addicted to substances, or both. To simply hide these individuals away in shelters without fully addressing their underlying conditions is inhumane. They will emerge just as sick as they went in. Rather than building ever more shelters, at great cost and with a negative impact to surrounding communities, we should use our compassionate dollars to treat the underlying conditions. This can be done by compassionately holding people accountable and conditioning state-supported shelter access on some basic rules. These rules should include, at a minimum, a prohibition against drug dealing, a requirement to participate in behavioral health screening, and a requirement to actively partake of mental health treatment and/or substance abuse treatment where warranted. Hand-in-hand with this approach, we need to ensure that there are adequate community recovery centers as well as in-patient and out-patient mental health treatment facilities.
Paid for by Elect Marcia Kelbon, PO Box 181, Quilcene, WA 98376
Contact us: e-mail: info@electmarciakelbon.com , Call or text: 360.774.0150