1. Remember the uproar over the surveillance cameras when former Mayor Greg Nickels proposed installing them in four Seattle parks?
Update: City council staff say the cameras—which cost the city just over $400,000 to install—have actually been inactive, the result of budget shortfalls that caused the council to allocate camera funding to other programs.
In theory, police staff in the West Precinct could still use the cameras in Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill (the rest are inoperational), but no one has watched or monitored the cameras for over a year and a half, sources say.
2. During a public forum at Seattle University last night, proponents and opponents of City Council member Tim Burgess’ proposal to crack down on aggressive panhandling made the case for and against the measure. (The legislation—which the Defend Association Racial Disparity Project, says doesn’t address the most common complaints people have made about aggressive panhandlers, and that most of the complaints would be addressed by existing law—would prohibit soliciting from people using ATMs and parking meters; using abusive language while asking for money; pursuing a person who has refused to give money; and offering or providing unsolicited services without consent.)
Jon Scholes, policy director at the Downtown Seattle Association, and Burgess argued that the legislation is needed to make downtown feel safe again for residents and visitors. “Our members and residents have had encounters with people who will follow them, people who will get in their face … people who are soliciting for organizations as well as people who are soliciting for their own benefit. So it’s a wide area of concern,” Scholes said.
Tim Harris, executive director of the homeless newspaper Real Change, argued that the people Scholes and Burgess wanted to protect were primarily rich condo owners. “These [panhandlers] are people who are interfering visibly with our cathedral of consumption downtown,” Harris said. “This isn’t about balancing order versus liberty. This is about [protecting] the comfort zones of the affluent up against the dirt poor in a time of radical inequality. … If you’re rich living downtown, no matter how many moats you have, [being asked for money] is going to be unsettling.”
Scholes countered that most of the people living downtown are renters, and few are rich. “Our downtown is not full of moats and penthouses.”
Burgess’ legislation reportedly has the support of a majority of council members; the council will take up the proposal later this month.
3. We’ve reported how a few amendments to this year’s education reform bill in Olympia—amendments that would establish strict teacher evaluations—have gone down in flames, perhaps putting our state’s chances of getting federal education dollars in jeopardy according to reformers.
Killing those amendments was key to passing the bill though, because it secured the support of the teachers union —and thus the majority Democrats. The Governor now wants to sign the bill and move forward, arguing that the evaluations standards in the legislation are strong enough to make Washington state competitive for federal money.
However, one amendment that did pass may now sink the bill either way. The House added an amendment to the bill that commits the the state to spending over $1 billion on the expanded definition “basic education” standards that passed last year.
In a post on the Senate Democrats blog on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-3, Spokane) denounced the House amendment:
That language does not have the same strong bipartisan support in the Senate, where many senators believe that in order to commit to spending billions more in basic education, we must first identify revenue to back up that future obligation.
The Senate would like to see SB 6696 move forward with just the Race to the Top language to ensure that we as a state are well positioned to compete for the Race to the Top grant.
HB 2776 is notable policy that deserves to be discussed on its own merits. But bringing it into the separate discussion of how to qualify for Race to the Top money only muddies the Senate’s important proposal to compete for these winnable federal funds.
4. A bill to raise the hazardous substance tax (which would raise $100 million for storm water cleanup and maybe for patching up the general fund) may be in jeopardy. The oil industry is circulating a memo among legislators arguing that the tax is unconstitutional because it amounts to a gas tax. The 18th amendment to Washington state’s constitution says gas taxes can only be spent on roads.
Environmentalists have responded with a memo of their own, pointing that the industry has been paying the tax since 1988 without ever raising constitutional complaints and that the tax is constitutional because it is based on value—which the state Supreme Court has ruled is not coverd by the 18th Amendment—rather than volume.
