Ag and Rural Caucus for August
| Link to recording: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/8rotV91KVospsvR_hKAj9pBXcs8XPVqwmSato0W5EoBkCdrkUJlwd1Em7GDeHWpl.qoWvLz3I1_DCNT70 Secretary of State documents: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/2024-general-election-voters-guide/2024-initiative-information Interactive map of Climate Commitment Act projects by county: https://riskofrepeal.cleanprosperousinstitute.org/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=385edda9-7d82-429e-a9d4-bbc628eef623 |
| Better Practices 6:30 pm Thursday 1 August Ballot Initiatives Climate Commitment, Washington Cares, Capital Gains Excise Tax Representative Beth Doglio, LD 22 (Olympia) Calvin Jones, Outreach Director, Defend Washington Julia Terlinchamp, Agricultural Policy Professional Libby Watson, Campaign Manager, No on 2124 Samantha Casne, Campaign Manager, No on 2109 https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88689149657?pwd=R3dXbFRpYVUyeGVhb3ErTFI0QXlpZz09 Policy Briefing 6:30 pm Thursday 15 August Homeless in Rural Washington Jordan Green, ED, Walla Walla Alliance for the Homeless https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85907982157?pwd=MU4vV3E3VGZ5VU02dnhvZjg2b3hKZz09 Paste link into browser. |
| For Official Information The Secretary of State reports on the Initiatives are here. Go to Initiatives to the Legislature. |
| I-2117 Repeal Climate Commitment Act: Many dollars; big missteps No ambiguity in the title: Initiative Measure No. 2117 would repeal the Climate Commitment Act, and bar state agencies from implementing carbon tax credit trading programs. The cost? In 2023, cap-and-invest auctions raised $1.8 billion. And, so what? This would reduce or eliminate funding for numerous programs and projects, including for: transportation emissions reduction; transit, pedestrian safety; ferry and other transportation electrification; air quality improvement; renewable and clean energy; grid modernization and building decarbonization; increasing the climate resilience of the state’s waters, forests and other ecosystems; fire prevention and forest health; and restoring and improving salmon habitat. Local government fiscal impacts are indeterminate. To be very specific, go to this interactive map. Several years ago I wrote a brief in support of the Climate Commitment Act. It was in the series of Making Government Work for Us. I reprint it below. The last paragraph cites Sec 24(2)(f)(i) which says that CCA will support “’Programs, activities, or projects that directly improve energy affordability and reduce the energy burden of people with lower incomes, as well as the higher transportation fuel burden of rural residents…’” (Emphasis added). CCA did not do this. Gasoline prices at the pumps soared and CCA was blamed. And CCA failed to deliver on its promise to exempt on-farm fuel use and fuel used to take farm products to market. Growers faced with lower commodity prices and higher fertilizer and herbicide costs were hammered by high diesel costs for their combines right in the middle of harvest. The political fall-out remains severe and is probably irreversible. The legislative failure was inattention to the fact that fuel costs flow down the supply chain. CCA imagined that increased costs on refiners and distributors would somehow be internalized and not have a measurable effect at the gasoline pump. Or maybe they realized it but failed to mitigate the effect, as required in Sec 24(2)(f)(i). A parallel misstep was the Ecology’s failure to follow through with the administrative detail on how to exempt agriculture. Farmers and their advocates have not forgotten, even though programs are now in place. It is important to keep CCA generating funds to achieve our climate and equity goals. We have motivated opposition. Don 30 July 2024 Four Arguments in support of SB 5126 Climate Commitment Act The State of Washington passed SB 5126 Climate Commitment Act. It is a cap-and-invest bill. Most emitters of Green House Gases (GHG) will be required to purchase authorizations to pollute with the cap on permitted emissions declining annually. The proceeds from the authorization sales are dedicated to redressing environment injustice in highly vulnerable communities. The Climate Commitment Act puts Washington at the forefront of combating climate change and it is an affirmation of Environmental Justice. Democrats passed the Climate Commitment Act with zero Republican votes. Three House Democrats and two Senate Democrats withheld support. The arguments for Washington State capping GHG emission are: (1) It is the right thing to do in light of the changing climate due to human-sourced CO2 contamination. (2) If we do not take the lead in combatting climate change, who will? We cannot expect other emitters to reduce emissions if we do not take the first step. It is significant that we lead and set the model. 3) It is smart for Washington State to get a head start on the transition to a post-carbon economy. Washington State innovators will achieve a comparative advantage by developing technologies to comply with Washington’s cap on emissions. We will create new industries, new skills, and new jobs. The Republican position all along has been that what we do in Washington is trivial relative to the global problem. Even if they acknowledge that humans add to climate change, Republicans argue that increasing the cost of carbon in Washington state puts a burden on business and consumers without any measurable benefit to the environment. Put directly, why ask a mother in Othello to pay more at the gas pump while China builds coal plants. Rural Democrats can counter with the equally hard-headed proposition that we need to protect and create jobs by adopting early the necessary adjustments to our economy. This line of argument by-passes the state’s contribution to global warming and says that Washington needs to be first in figuring out how to survive and create new jobs as we do. The post-carbon economy is not a matter of if but when, and when is soon. Paying our share of global carbon is not hair-shirted penance – it is smart economic investment to get a head start. This leaves the-mother-in-Othello problem. How do we protect the powerless in our society from absorbing the near-term costs of this adjustment? We go to a fourth argument for capping GHG emissions: it is a revenue source for funding worthy investments. The Climate Commitment Act is at once environmental policy and social policy. Environmental Justice is as much of the CCA’s language as Climate Change. The Environmental Justice component is an opportunity for rural Democrats. The CCA addresses “vulnerable populations” and “overburdened communities”. Reasonably enough, CCA’s first priority for remediation are the census tracts along I-5 south of Seattle to Tacoma. The CCA language, though, is broader when it addresses reducing disparities in race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and disparities by location. This is where the details matter. The definitions capture rural communities and the environmental justice assessment language extends as well to rural as well as urban census tracts. (The mapping of regional disparities of life chances is the Department of Health Environmental Public Health Data.) Rural communities can use the CCA to its advantage but the advantages will not be dispensed automatically. Rural communities need to organize early to ensure that the CCA allocations correspond to the CCA provisions. This requires first that rural communities recognize that we incorporate census tracts that qualify as among the poorest in the state, that our neighbors may be less well-educated, less-well integrated into the white-dominated society, have poorer health and inferior access to health resources. Rural community advantage next requires that we and our local officials participate in the early planning sessions of how to implement the CCA. Early decisions taken will bias the workings of CCA. Make sure that this inevitable bias includes rural communities. As for that mother-in-Othello, go to CCA Sec 24(2)(f)(i): “Programs, activities, or projects that directly improve energy affordability and reduce the energy burden of people with lower incomes, as well as the higher transportation fuel burden of rural residents…” |
| Thursday our Better Practices session will take up Initiatives I-2124 (Washington Cares), I-2109 Capital Gains Excise Tax), and I-2117 (Climate Commitment Act). These initiatives will appear on your November ballot. Each significantly challenges or cancels recent Democratic legislative successes. We have a team of spokespeople presenting on Thursday. All are advocates for the existing programs and oppose the initiatives. I am reminded by a friend that ARC tries to provide a range of views on important questions. In this case, I will rely on you to bring this disparate information to the session. We all will benefit from hearing a diversity of views. I-2124 Make Washington Cares Optional I-2124 makes participation in the Washington Cares insurance program optional. If adopted, Initiative Measure No. 2124 (I-2124) would change how participation in the long-term care insurance program works. Employees and self-employed persons who are currently participating in the program would be able to opt out at any time. A person who opts out would not contribute premiums to the program and would not be eligible for the $36,500 benefit. The effect of voluntary participation would be to either make the program financially bankrupt or require politically unsustainable increases in premiums. Three years ago, in 2021, I circulated a series of briefs under the heading of “Making Government Work for Us.” The occasion was that the Democratic legislature had passed bills that made life for rural Democrats more difficult. I tried to find the positive in the legislation and reverse the spin. The idea was to provide sufficient background for ARC people to craft persuasive messaging around the legislation. Below is the brief on WA Cares. Note that the legislature addressed the deficiencies in the original bill. Don 28 July 2024 WA Cares: Fatally Flawed? You choose In 2019 the Legislature passed Bill 1087 setting up a long-term care (LTC) trust program funded by 0.58 percent on employee wages and providing up to $36,500 per person in benefits (WA Cares). HB 1087 started in the House with bi-partisan support, passing 63-33. In the Senate, one Republican (Warnick) and three Democrats (Hobbs, Mullet, Sheldon) crossed and the bill passed 26-22. When HB 1087 came back to the House party lines had stiffened and only Democrats supported final passage in the House. The bill’s Section 1 lays out its reasoning in common language. Section 1 (1) long-term health care is not covered by Medicare and private insurance is expensive. More than ninety percent of senior are uninsured for long-term care. Section 1 (2) “The majority of people over sixty-five will need long-term” care and “most have not saved enough to cover long-term care costs.” Medicaid can kick in after all the person’s assets are gone, “leaving family members in jeopardy for their own future care needs. In Washington, more than eight hundred fifty thousand [850,000] unpaid family caregivers provided care valued at eleven billion dollars [$11,000,000,000] in 2015.” And those unpaid family caregivers “lose an average of three hundred fifty thousand dollars in their own income” and benefits. Section 1 (3) “…the average cost for Medicaid in-home care is twenty-four thousand dollars per year and the average cost for nursing home care is sixty-five thousand dollars per year.” Section 1 (4) The unpaid workforce is going away: “Today, there are around seven potential caregivers for each senior, but by 2030 that ratio will decrease to four…” Section 1 (5) Medicaid is expensive for the state. The cost is expected to double by 2030, amounting to an “additional six billion dollars. ”In summary, Section (6) says Long-term Care could “relieve hardship on families, and lessen the burden of Medicaid on the state budget…and could result in positive economic impact to our state through…fewer Washingtonians leaving the workforce to provide unpaid care. ”The $36,500 benefit is a simple calculation of $100 per day for a year, and the 0.58 percent payroll deduction is actuarially derived. The benefit is calculated to cover the costs of the “average in-home care consumer” and provide relief for the average facility-care consumer. So, why are you hearing about “WA Cares” now? The last amendment in the Senate to HB 1087 provided an exemption to enrollment (and payroll tax) if you already have long-term care insurance. The deadline to claim an exemption was 1 November. The effect of the exemption opportunity was to create a run on private LTC insurance policies. The handful of companies offering LTC insurance in Washington suspended sales several months ago after seeing an extraordinary surge in requests. This seemed strange. Why walk away from business? Private LTC insurance policies are much more expensive than WA Cares. At $50,000 income, WA Cares costs $290 annually; a private LTC policy would cost ca $3,000. The companies judged that the demand was hollow. People would sign up, brokers would be paid their commissions, people would qualify for the exemption and then cancel the insurance before the first premium. The insurance companies were not excited. (Caught up in this game were genuine customers seeking LTC insurance.) We now have headlines “Inslee should suspend WA Cares program law” (The Columbian) and on September 22, twenty GOP senators plus Hobbs, Mullet, and Sheldon wrote to Inslee demanding that he suspend WA Cares implementation. The Republicans have mounted a full-court press against WA Cares including an initiative, I-1436, to defeat WA Cares by making it optional. Other than the kerfuffle around meeting the exemption deadline, there are three issues that need sorting. 1. Because Washington residency is required to qualify for benefits, if you live in Oregon or Idaho but work in Washington and pay the WA Cares premium, you do not receive any benefit. 2. If you live and work in Washington and pay into WA Cares but then move out of state, you lose your contributions to WA Cares. 3. If you are now close to retirement when WA Cares begins, you may not meet the years-worked vesting requirement in order to claim benefits. These questions should be addressed by the Legislature and resolved. They are legitimate questions but they do not rise to the level of challenging the significance of WA Cares. WA Cares is a trust program with a set maximum contribution 0.85 percent of your W-2. It is not a tax; it is insurance. As insurance, not everyone will live to claim, and for some it may not cover quite enough. It provides “meaningful assistance to middle class families” (Section 1 (10)). It is a benefit for all generations within a family. It may even benefit rural families greater because we have family near – and family members are eligible to be compensated under WA Cares. The legislature stepped up to create an insurance framework that covers the long-term care needs of most Washingtonians, is funded by employees themselves, and is affordable. It is a government nudge for us to save for our own future. WA Cares does what government does best – provide us with the tools to realize our family’s health and welfare. Democrats passed WA Cares and we should be proud. |
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