The so-called Road User Future Funding Task Force would consist of 17 members, including four legislators, four from state agencies and nine appointed by the Governor. By October 1, 2014 the task force would have to issue recommendations to the governor and legislature on how best to meter miles, collect fees, protect privacy, and address uncertainties and public concerns about charging by the mile. The task force might also develop draft legislation for joint trials with neighboring states, and then if trials go well, help propose final legislation for implementation of a mileage charging scheme by 2022 or 2023.

The bill analysis by committee staff emphasizes that the idea of a vehicle mileage tax has precedent. Pilot projects have already been conducted by the Puget Sound Regional Council in King County, by state authorities in Oregon, and elsewhere. Special reports by the U.S. Transportation Research Board in 2009 and 2010 have respectively detailed current VMT technologies, and how to run system trials, the analysis states. A GPS-like device in every vehicle is one way mileage could be tracked although other technologies are also being explored. A fiscal note accompanying the bill estimates costs of $6.8 million to administer the task force from 2012 through 2017. Additional expenses would ensue if the task force continues to its 2022 sunset. Federal and private funding could offset costs.

Sponsors of HB 2704 are Republicans Katrina Asay of Federal Way and Mike Armstrong of Wenatchee; plus Democrats Judy Clibborn of Mercer Island, Marco Liias of Lynnwood and Andy Billig of Spokane.

Following is TVW video of the Feb. 1 committee hearing on HB 2704, comprised of supportive testimony from AAA Washington and the Transportation Choices Coalition.

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Under state law the detailed report is issued every four years but does not make recommendations on what exemptions to maintain and which to end. Of the 642 exemptions granted, only 452 would be likely to increase revenues, the report states. Exemptions also refer to exclusions, deductions, preferential rates, tax deferrals and credits.

The report warns it’s not possible to say that the $29.3 billion in exemptions would yield the same amount in revenue if ended. (This is because once an exemption is lifted, the associated taxable business activity may decline in volume compared to before). Of the $29.3 billion in tax benefits dispensed by lawmakers, $24 billion is due to exemptions from taxes paid to the state. Exemptions to retail sales and use taxes and the business and occupation tax together account for about four-fifths of that $24 billion in state tax benefits dispensed. Another $5.3 billion in state-authorized tax exemptions come at the local government level.

Included in the report is a summary listing of all tax preferences which would yield some degree of revenue if curtailed. Others which exist but would yield no revenue if ended are so labeled, and marked in red. According to the itemized list, here are some of the largest state-level tax exemptions granted which would produce some amount of revenue if lifted.

Largest business and occupation tax exemptions granted 2011-2013

Largest retail sales and use tax exemptions granted 2011-2013

Largest other tax exemptions granted 2011-2013

To date, there has been no comprehensive state review of the quantifiable economic benefits of the $29.3 billion in state-authorized tax exemptions in the current biennium.

RELATED: State of Washington spending up 57 percent from 1999-2011, Public Data Ferret.

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According to a portion of the December 2011 “Dashboard” report presented to the KCLS board by staff, highlights of the capital improvement plan building program already achieved in 2012 or expected to be completed this year include new facilities in Newcastle and Duvall and expansions in Auburn, Bellevue, and Lake Forest Park. New facilities are expected to progress this year toward an eventual construction start (2013 or later) at Vashon Island, Federal Way (320th St.) and Tukwila. In addition, non-bond construction of new libraries for Renton and Renton Highlands have cleared the design phase.

USER INSTRUCTIONS: Simply click on any branch name below (not the nearby dot) for more project-specific information. Our special thanks to KCLS Web Services Manager Lisa Hill for her assistance developing and sharing a WordPress-embeddable version of the KCLS code we used for the live map here.

It would ramp up gradually with projected revenues of $79.3 million in 2013, $215 million from 2013-2015 and $221.8 billion in 2015-17, according to an updated accompanying fiscal note provided by the state Office of Financial Management to Public Data Ferret Thursday. If 2015-2017 revenues held steady through 2023, the legislation would yield slightly less than $1.2 billion total in the decade starting next year.

The Senate Transportation Committee held a hearing on SB 6455 earlier this week. It was drafted in response to a proposed $3.6 billion 10-year transportation funding plan outlined by Gregoire after her transportation task force issued its report.

A report on SB 6455 by committee staff details hikes in commercial vehicle license fees, other vehicle fee hikes, a new $100 annual fee for electric vehicles, a new $5 fee for the purchase of each studded tire, and a $1.50 fee for each barrel of petroleum products processed in the state.

Under the bill local or regional bodies called transportation benefit districts with a two-thirds vote of their governing bodies could create additional funding to help meet their needs with an additional annual fee of up to $40 per vehicle. Counties could impose a vehicle excise tax of up to 1 percent of the value of a vehicle. Separately, state-authorized electronic tolling is being rolled out on a number of highway corridor projects and will add to funding but state projections show it won’t be a fiscal silver bullet.

Public attention often fastens on how to pay for high-profile projects such as the replacement of the State Route 520 bridge connecting Seattle with Eastside job centers such as Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond. It is still about $2 billion shy of needed dollars for completion even after the factoring in of years of revenue from recently-initiated electronic tolling. But another key concern for lawmakers, local and regional officials, and especially motorists is degraded pavement and deferred road maintenance. This priority is emphasized in the Governor’s task force report. Costs for maintaining roadways and ferry service are pegged at $3.1 billion over 10 years.

The scale of the state roads maintenance challenge alone (not including state ferry service maintenance) is indicated in a September 2010 report from the Washington Department of Transportation’s Materials Laboratory to the legislature.

It says the state has already budgeted $1 billion from 2011 through 2021, or an average of $100 million annually, specifically to help eliminate the backlog of asphalt pavement repair projects. But the report also warns that it would take twice that amount, or $200 million annually over ten years, to do the job. The report adds that for $176 million annually the state could at least keep the backlog from growing larger, but less than that amount of annual pavement rehab spending will cause the backlog to grow.

If approved SB 6445 would dedicate at least $30 million a year to pavement preservation.

A more narrowly-focused bill prepared as part of an alternative legislative strategy in case the more sweeping SB 6455 fails to advance, focuses just on the proposed $5 fee for each studded tire purchased in the state. Yet it also illustrates the gap between maintenance costs and dedicated revenues. The staff report for SB 6032 – also heard by the senate committee this week – notes that studded tires cause $24.7 million worth of damage to state roads each year. But the accompanying fiscal note projects the new studded tire fee would raise only about $525,000 to $560,000 per year.

Public Data Ferret’s Washington+Transportation+Finance & Budget archive

The governor’s task force report, called “Connecting Washington,” stresses that by law less than one-quarter of existing state fuel tax revenues can be used to address maintenance, operations and other unaddressed system needs. The rest is dedicated to paying off debt issued for 421 priority transportation projects now being completed by the state in connection with two gas tax hikes last decade. The report also emphasizes the purchasing power of the state gas tax has declined sharply because of inflation and because actual revenues have been broadly lagging estimates. It also accents expected major increases in population, jobs and vehicle miles traveled. The report recommends that far more sweeping strategies be seriously considered to secure long-term surface transportation funding for the state.

In the longer term, higher standards of vehicle fuel efficiency, the emergence of electric vehicles, changes in development patterns and other factors will continue to erode the viability of the fuel tax as the primary source of funding for maintenance and improvement of the transportation system. Therefore, the Task Force urges the Legislature to support the exploration of alternative mechanisms that could provide more stable and predictable funding over the long term. This would include mechanisms such as a direct user fee that is based on miles traveled, wear-and-tear on the roadways, or other direct impact upon the transportation system, allowing the system to be managed and funded as a statewide transportation utility with rates based upon use.

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These are the key findings of the new study published late last month in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine by researchers at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, the university’s departments of Environmental and Ocupational Health Sciences, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries (DLI). The study was funded by the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and the National Center For Injury Prevention and Control.

Worried about rising deaths from prescription opioids in Washington and nationally, Washington state health and medical “payer” agencies (including Medicaid, DLI’s workers comp division, and the state departments of corrections and health) convened an expert group to develop a Web-based educational pilot program launched in April 2007. It emphasized to doctors that before continuing to prescribe 120 mg per day or more of opioids to non-cancer chronic pain patients whose condition had not been improving, they should consult with a pain medicine expert about other treatments combined with lower daily doses of opioids. The program also included a Web-based tool allowing physicians to easily calculate the total daily morphine-equivalent dosages (MED) ingested by a patients from all three classes of opioids.

To evaluate possible benefits for patients of the new guidelines, researchers focused on historical data in several categories both before and after the pilot program began, among claimants for workers’ compensation through DLI, which covers two-thirds of the non-federal workforce in the state for work-related injury claims.

After lenient state prescribing guidelines were established in 1999 for prescription opioids, fatal overdoses of injured workers covered through Washington State’s workers’ compensation plan from painkillers such as morphine, oxycodone, methadone and fentanyl rose at an alarming rate through 2005, dropped slightly in 2006 and 2007, rose markedly in 2008, and then spiked again in 2009, according to data gathered for the study. But the troubling occurrences declined markedly in 2010 – for the first year since implementation of a new educational pilot program in April 2007 which warned prescribing doctors to consider lowering their prescription opioid dosages in certain cases.

After that program roll-out, other improvements occurred even sooner, the study reports. Paid prescriptions for Schedule 2 opioids for workers’ comp claimants – which had risen sharply since 1996 – leveled off through 2008 then declined markedly over 2009 and 2010. Paid prescriptions among the same pool of claimants for Schedule 3 opioids such as codeine and hydrocodone were relatively steady from 1996 through 2008 but dropped to a 14-year low over 2009 and 2010. And beginning in the first quarter of 2008, the percentage of workers being paid disability claims by the state for lost work hours due to injury, who were also taking prescription opioids, began a steady and robust decline through year-end 2010.

The research team which authored the study emphasizes more data is needed in coming years to confirm the preliminary correlations between risk reduction and the dosing guidelines educational program. They also say there is room for improving awareness levels of Washington state doctors on safe guidelines for prescribing opioids and that this could yield greater improvements in the areas measured. They urge “wider and more effective use of State-based prescription monitoring programs…including ‘pushing’ evidence-based educational content to providers…” A new Washington state law approved by the legislature in 2010 and finalized with key specifics last year makes mandatory the 120 mg per day opioid dosage oversight provisions of the 2007 guidelines.

The authors write that “diversion” or unauthorized pilfering of prescription opioids from medical or pharmaceutical facilities, may – along with “shopping” for doctors known for liberal prescribing of opioids – account for most of the fatal prescription opioid overdoses in predominantly rural areas. But they stress it’s a different story in urban and suburban settings where dosage levels and monitoring are especially important and a raft of studies show risks of a serious adverse event or death are significantly less likely if total daily dosages of prescription opioids per patient are closer to 20 mg than 100 or 120.

Shoreline has already adopted its own healthy city strategy called Shoreline4Health. One stated goal is to develop a tobacco free zone in city parks and public spaces. The staff memo at the front of the council information packet recommends the city conduct an online survey at its Web site of local residents to gauge support for smoke-free parks legislation which the council could develop and pass into law. The survey would be during the first three months of this year. It would not be scientifically valid, the memo states, but it would be useful and would have a mechanism to block most people from taking it more than once.

Passive enforcement only
If the city does approve a new law banning smoking in parks and other outdoor publicly-owned spaces then enforcement should be limited to signage and peer pressure according to city policy advisors. The memo states, “staff does not recommend that additional resources be spent on increased police and/or park patrols for this specific regulation and would rely on education and ‘peer to peer’ enforcement as the predominant enforcement mechanism.”

Amidst the 37 pages in the information packet, there is no data or anecdotal information on the degree to which adopted policy, signage and hoped-for peer enforcement have been effective in actually reducing smoking in public parks and other publicly-owned outdoor spaces.

The Scourge Of Butts
A report in the information packet from the Tobacco-Free Parks unit of Public Health Seattle & King County’s U.S. grant-funded program called Communities Putting Prevention To Work states 2,096 cigarette butts were found during volunteer cleanups in Shoreline’s Paramount Park and 1,265 butts in Shoreline’s Hamlin Park. Additional material in the packet from a Tobacco-Free Parks Policy Implementation Guide produced by a related King County program called LetsDoThisKingCounty.org says 480 million cigarette butts are littered in Washington state each year. In the up to 15 years it takes them to decompose they can leach cadmium, arsenic and other poisons into the soil. Discarded cigarette butts are the third most frequent cause of outdoor fires that can be prevented and can also be swallowed by young children, dogs, birds and fish.

Supporters of smoke-free parks in King County also assert benefits include:

Shoreline would be sixth jurisdiction in King County with smoke-free parks
King County officials also stress that county residents have voiced 72 percent support for smoking bans in outdoor public places in a 2007 state survey, and that related bans are in place in 15 Washington counties representing a total of 42 government agencies. In King County, the cities of Auburn, Covington, and Snoqualmie and the the Vashon Island parks district have resolutions, rules or ordinances in place. In November, the city of Burien joined that list. In City of Seattle parks, all tobacco use is barred within 25 feet of other people, play areas and beaches.

Indoor public smoking ban already in effect statewide
In 2005, Washington voters approved a smoking ban in indoor public spaces including bars, taverns and restaurants. Although some opponents had worried the measure would drive business away, a study published by the Centers For Disease Control found that sales tax receipts in these types of establishments actually rose instead.

Public Data Ferret’s King County+Public Health archive

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The new report shows PhotoSafe’s 17 traffic safety enforcement cameras operated in 2011 at a net loss to the city of $125,888. It’s possible that fiscally at least the program is a victim of its own success. Red-light infractions captured through a total of five cameras at three main intersections in Auburn and thus related revenues have continued to decrease. In the first several years after the five cameras were installed there were more dramatic decreases in red-light infractions at the targeted intersections, on the order of 20 to 30 percent annually. In 2011 though improvements in driver behavior began to level off with the smallest decline in red-light camera tickets issued by the city from year prior, just 6.2 percent. 

Auburn red-light camera violation-to-infraction conversions hit five-year low
As well, in 2011 the percentage of filmed red-light camera violations which cleared the bar to being classified as infractions for which fines could be collected declined to a five-year low of 78.9 percent, down from 85 percent in 2007. That percentage has decreased every year. Some violations do not become “infractions,” the report states, due to license plates unreadable by the cameras, emergency vehicles granted leeway, severe inclement weather or inability to confirm a violation actually occurred.

Speeding infractions captured by 12 more cameras around six schools in Auburn have also already declined dramatically, according to the report.

Injuries and collisions have not declined at red-light camera intersections
Meanwhile, compared to 2011 the combined number of collisions and injuries per year at the three red-light camera intersections has remained unchanged since 2007, the first year all three were surveilled. Collisions at three intersections rose from 31 in 2007 to 38 in 2008, then dropped to 33 in 2009, 30 in 2010 and 31 in 2011. Injuries went from 11 in 2007 to 9 in 2008, 12 in 2009, 20 in 2010 and 11 in 2011.

Committee chair wonders if it’s time to sunset some of the cameras
Peloza is a veteran council member who serves on several intergovernmental regional policy committees and worked at Boeing for 38 years in contract management. He says the PhotoSafe report to the city council committee suggests it’s at least time to discuss whether some cameras should be de-comissioned. “When possibly do we remove a photo camera, when possibly the work has been accomplished to educate motorists driving through our city? When do we reach a go/no-go position on some of them? I know the cameras have had a major effect near our schools. Many of the speeders in our school zones have been parents. We’ve made a safe haven around those schools and that’s a wonderful accomplishment.”

PhotoSafe’s red ink a concern
Although the city has been careful not to fund PhotoSafe from the general budget, Peloza said, the mounting red ink is a concern. He says he intends to ask city staff Monday night where exactly the funds are coming from to cover the losses. Another city report on PhotoSafe released last fall revealed that the program had lost $70,041 in the first eight months of 2011 and $42,635 over its full life at that point. The first cameras were installed in 2006. Based on those numbers and the new report, the city lost $$55,847 on PhotoSafe in the last four months of 2011, bringing the annual loss to the stated $125,888 and the life-of-program loss to $98,482.

However it is possible that the committee and the full council will remain convinced the benefits of the program outweigh the costs. And it is unclear whether removing cameras in Auburn might not lead to increases in motorists running red lights at the monitored intersections and speeding in the school safety zones.

More cameras could be added
Despite the growing red ink Auburn could choose to add more cameras still. The report to the committee states, “surveys are regularly conducted to locate new intersections and school zones to be added in an effort to improve public safety. In addition, the city is evaluating the possibility of adding photo enforcement at railroad crossings.”

The red-light cameras are installed at 4th Street Southeast and Auburn Way South; M Street Southeast and Auburn Way South; and 8th Street Northeast and Harvey. Two different speeding cameras per school are installed on approaches to Mount Baker/Gildo Rey, Chinook Elementary, Dick Scobee, Lea Hill Elementary, Arthur Jacobsen, and Lakeland Hills Elementary.

Public Data Ferret’s Auburn archive

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According to UW Police, the student said he had not been involved in any disputes or other activites which would have prompted the graffiti. Rittereiser stated,”‘this is being investigated as a hate crime due to the connection of the symbolism and the victim’s religious affiliation.” He added that UW Police detectives “are looking to see if there are similar incidents that may have happened and may not have been reported.” Haggett personnel are assisting with the investigation. No suspects have yet been identified. Haggett’s Resident Director Marissa Adamczyk responded to a reporter’s requests for an interview Friday afternoon with an email that she would not be available to talk until next Tuesday and has so far declined to reply to a follow-up email request to discuss the incident sooner.

If a suspect were to be identified and probable cause determined by campus police, then the case would be turned over to the King County Prosecutor’s office for further review and possible prosecution. Under Washington state law defacing with a swastika the property of an individual who is or is perceived to be Jewish is one way in which the Class C felony of malicious harassment can be committed. According to state statutes, Class C felonies upon conviction can be punished by up to five years in jail or a $10,000 fine, or both.

Haggett Hall is located at 4290 Whitman Court NE. Haggett’s third floor An adjoining but separate portion of Haggett’s third floor is a themed “International Community” which according to its UW Web page aims “to offer an enhanced living learning environment with an international focus. This community may be of particular interest to international students, students with experience or interest in studying abroad, and students interested in world issues.”

According to the constitution of the Haggett People’s Council, which is the governing body of the residence hall and its liaison to UW-Seattle’s student government, “we are dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment for students of all racial, ethnic, cultural, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic, and religious backgrounds.”

UPDATE, Monday, 1/23/12: In a phone interview Adamczyk said, “I was aghast that a student accepted to the University of Washington would do something like this. We assume that they come in with a certain level of maturity and respect for others, but that was not the case in this instance.” Adamczyk added an email was sent to all Haggett Hall residents notifying them that a hate crime had occurred; that the building administration takes it seriously; and that they should forward any information about this or similar incidents. Adamczyk confirmed no suspect has yet been identified and for now the assumption is that the act occurred in an empty hallway. There are no security cameras covering the hallway in question. The affected student was disturbed but has received assistance and support from building staff, students and his faith community, Adamczyk said.

Public Data Ferret’s University of Washington archive

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