For this week’s Q&A, I took advantage of Committee Days (which you can watch live on TVW today) and interviewed two leaders in the House. First up, Rep. Richard DeBolt, leader of the Republican caucus. Then: Rep. Lynn Kessler, Majority leader in the House. The interviews are below in the order in which they were conducted, as usual.

Rep. Richard DeBolt:
Q: There’s an estimated $2.6 billion less in the state biennial budget. What are your specific ideas for dealing with this?
DeBolt: We had a lot of specific ideas on how not to get here. We’ve been talking to people for a couple years about reducing the budget. It’s important to understand that this is a choice made that (majority Democrats) knew this was going to happen and they knew they were going to create this bow wave. We talked to them about creating a sustainable budget and at that point we brought solutions to the table and they weren’t taken.
We’re going to go back in, we’re looking at the budget right now, and some hard decisions have to be made. We’ll be a part of the process if the Democrats like.
(more…)

Tags: Budget, DeBolt, Kessler, taxes, Thursday Q&A

This week’s Q&A is with State Treasurer Jim McIntire, who sat down for an interview in late summer (elections-related Q&As took precedent for a bit, but now we’re back to state leaders). McIntire talked about a nail-biting bank fail on his third day in office, legislation that will help keep public deposits safe, and how he helps manage about $60 billion of taxpaer money.

What follows is the complete interview. Enjoy!

Q: I don’t think a lot of people know what the state Treasurer does. How do you describe your job?

McIntire: Actually we just redid our web site and we have a great description on there and there’s a lot of information. One of the things we’ve done is highlight some performance measures that focus on some of the key activities of the Treasurer’s office.

One of the things that we do is that we are responsible for investing all of the short term cash reserves for the state. We have roughly $3 billion in cash. The state’s monthly expenses are about $3 billion. What we’re trying to do is to maximize that money, but first we have to make sure it’s safe and secure. It also has to be perfectly liquid so we have complete access, and then we want a good return. We go after return only after the first two.
If you look at the returns we’ve been getting, we tend to do better than what you would find in a private sector market. We actually do pretty well.
So, we manage that short term balance and we do the same thing with local governments that choose to put their money in the Local Government Investment Pool – the LGIP is about $8 billion. In total, we’re managing about $11 billion for state and local government. That’s all very liquid, it’s all essentially in government securities in various forms. There’s no commercial paper. We do probably about $24 million a year in earnings. We’re very careful about how we invest that and we’re fairly large and we can anticipate the timing on a lot of it. So we have the ability to say here’s the core to that portfolio. We can invest some of it for longer periods of time knowing that this is what we’re not likely to have to dip into.
The other thing that we do is that the Treasurer is the only statewide elected official that sits on the statewide Investment Board. So I spend a fair amount of my activities on the state Investment Board on the unemployment insurance trust fund and other trust funds for universities, etc. In our combined trust fund, we have probably $48 billion. Overall it’s probably close to $60 billion in total investments. The combined fund is the one that has all of the pension fund dollars in it. That is something that I spend quite a bit of time worrying about. There are nine other voting members – (the pension account) is one that we continue to focus on. If you look at the performance measure, we’ve exceeded what we’ve considered our benchmark, which is the return for all other major public sector investment funds; we’ve exceeded their returns or had less than their losses for all of the 10 years.
So we’re doing quite well. The long-term assumption that we build the pension funding around is that we will have an 8 percent return on these funds. This fund has had, even with all the problems in the last year, an average of 7.9 percent. So we actually believe that the values in this fund will come up and respond pretty well as we come out of this recession.

The other two major areas as you probably know is that we issue all the debt for the state — or most of it — meaning we issue bonds here. We expect that this fiscal year we’ll issue about $2.25 billion in new debt for the state to finance – that’s for transportation, schools, universities and other capital projects. We’ve managed to avoid the spikes in the market and continue to issue debt. We’ve maintained a strong credit rating — we’re a Double A-rated state. We issued $3 billion in debt – the biggest piece was a transportation bond for $300 million – and those got the lowest interest rates that we’ve got in 30 years. We feel like we’re doing things pretty well.
The fact is that the state treasurer handles all of the cash transactions means we pay all the bills, handle all the receipts. We process $400 billion of transactions a year. When you think about that, it’s important to pay attention to how well we do that part of it as well. Our cost per transaction is substantially lower than the cost per transaction that other banks experience.

So if you look at the private sector benchmark that other banks experience, they average about 14 cents per transaction. We’re at 2 cents. Relative to the private sector, that saves us $1 million a year (in transaction fees).
My intent in redesigning the web page is to bring some light on what is it that we do. It’s not voodoo, it’s not black magic. We want to make it very transparent, to give the public and others the measures that we work with.

Q: What are the biggest challenges of your job?

McIntire: The biggest challenge when I faced when we came into office was with the public deposit issue. We had, on my third day in office, a bank fail. It was a small bank in Clark County. But part of the job in the Treasurer’s office is to look out for the public deposits for state and local governments in Washington. The Public Deposit Protection Commission meets and basically we approve where state and local governments can deposit their money. We set the regulations around that.

When I came in, the bank in Clark Co. failed on my third day in office and they had $24 million of public deposits. We discovered that we had one of the lowest collateralization policies in the country.

Q: What does that mean?

McIntire: Typically when an outside depositor makes a large deposit, the bank will, often in a Certificate of Deposit, buy a security to give them a little bit higher return than what the local government is going to get paid. But that difference is the bank’s profit.
Our requirement was 10 percent – meaning the bank had to keep 10 percent of that money on hand. So when that bank (in Clark County) went into receivership with the FDIC and the bank was sold, it turns out that there was $15 million in public deposits missing. On my fourth day in office, I got to tell the other banks that they had to make up the difference. (more…)

Tags: McIntire, state treasurer, Thursday Q&A

This week, I interviewed Larry Stickney, campaign manager of Protect Marriage Washington, which opposes Referendum 71. Below, you’ll find the complete text of our interview. When you’re done reading, check out Anne Levinson, on why she thinks voters should approve Referendum 71.

Q. Why should voters reject Referendum 71 (which would extend all state-granted rights and responsibilities of marriage to registered domestic partners)?
Stickney: On Nov. 3, we’re facing one of the most hotly contested bills ever. Why is it so controversial? In effect, Senate Bill 5688 will legalize homosexual marriage. Legalizing homosexual marriage would be the most profound policy change in our history.
The “Accept” folks and the homosexual activists are claiming that SB 5688 is not about marriage but their own leadership has said otherwise. As Sen. Ed Murray told the Seattle times on Jan. 10, 2007, when he announced the Domestic Partnership bill, “the goal is marriage equality. It’s an important statement that our eyes are on the prize and the prize is marriage.” Rep. Jamie Pedersen told the Times, “SB 5688 will give homosexuals a bridge until they can legally marry.” Murray again told the Times that the expansion 5688 is “an incremental approach, a strategic plan. And we believe 5688 is the last incremental step to same-sex marriage in Washington State.”
We believe that this whole homosexual marriage agenda is being promoted over the objections of a majority of Washingtonians. As presently, marriage is a common social good. If homosexual marriage becomes legal, the next step for homosexual activists is to teach children that homosexual unions are normal, to require churches to perform homosexual marriages.

Q: Last week I spoke to supporters of Referendum 71 who said those statements about school curriculum and churches are false. I want to give you a chance to explain how this will require schools to teach about homosexuality and churches to perform domestic partnerships. Will it?

Stickney: That’s a possibility. What we’re running into is a clash between what they claim to be a civil right and freedom of religion.
That’s happened in Canada. You’ve got examples from around the world here. You’ve had issues like a Knights of Columbus hall wouldn’t rent their hall for a homosexual marriage ceremony and eventually they were sued and fined $1,000 because they wouldn’t acquiesce. This is in British Colombia. This would be a violation of the very tannins of the Catholic Church.
In New Jersey, there’s a Methodist organization and in 2007 they refused to rent a facility to lesbians for a civil union ceremony. A complaint was filed with the state division of civil rights. It ruled against the Methodist group, the state revoked their tax exemption for the property because they refused to back down.

Q. Domestic partnerships do exist in Washington State currently – this would extend the benefits. Can you explain how expanding them would lead to that?

Stickney: Yes, I can. We have a national laboratory — it’s called Massachusetts — on the same-sex marriage issue. There in a recent case, parents of a young elementary school student objected to the curriculum and classroom discussion that was meant to inculcate the idea that there was no difference between marriages between a man and wife and same-sex relationships. The court upheld that public schools have an interest in teaching tolerance, including on the issue of gay marriage.
They’re saying that because there’s no specific language (in the bill to require schools to teach it), but they don’t need specific languages. All they need is the statute and they will develop the curriculum from there. I’ve got examples on our Web site of what has happened even here in Washington now. The site has many references to the activism we’re seeing here in Washington.
Much of the state curriculum is developed by some folks that are very much interested in promoting the homosexual agenda here. The first domestic partnership couple, one of the parties is a very active and a director of the Safe Schools Coalition in Seattle.

Q. Do you have examples of education curriculum being changed in Washington?

Stickney: Yes, there is. We have several examples. Go to www.protectmarriagewa.com and go to talking points and scroll down, you’ll see many reference about same sex examples in curriculum. And it goes into the early learning benchmarks of our state school system. You can reference documents – the F.L.A.S.H. curriculum is the top recommended curriculum for public schools to use. They recommend showing the video “We Are Family,” which teaches that same-sex relationships are the same as marriage.
There are also some oddities — they don’t currently add requirements for educating children, but it does force a new definition of the word “family.” It’s not about allowing choice for adult relationships. This law will result in children being taught that there is a different definition of “family,” so that same-sex partners will be a recognized norm.
Study after study after study has shown that that’s not best for children. That’s simply what we’re trying to uphold here is the standard of marriage as the very best for society. We understand there are occasions when you can’t achieve that, but we believe that it is the institution that should receive entitlements and benefits of marriage. We simply cannot go and raid the public treasury for every group that’s lobbied its way into getting civil rights. (more…)

Tags: Domestic partnerships, R71, Thursday Q&A

This week’s Q&A is with Anne Levinson, chair of the Approve Referendum 71 campaign. I talked to her about why she’s in favor of the referendum and some things she wants to clear up about it. Next Thursday, I’ll talk to a representative from the opposite camp on why they want the referendum to be defeated. Don’t miss it.

Q: In your own words, why should someone vote to approve Referendum 71, which would extend the state-granted rights and responsibilities of marriage to state-registered domestic partners?
Levinson: We have a law in this state called domestic partnership law and in our state in particular it’s broken into three parts. So we actually have laws passed in 2007, 2008 and 2009 that, together, collectively provide basic legal protections to committed couples who are in domestic partnerships. The purpose of the domestic partnership laws is to ensure that all Washington families are treated the same with the same legal protections, the same rights and the same obligations as their neighbors.

So under the domestic partnership laws, same sex couples and opposite sex couples with at least one partner age 62 or older can register for a domestic partnership in order that their families have these legal protections.

In June of this year, a group of people who are opposed to domestic partnerships filed a referendum to appeal the domestic partnership law. Voters are asked whether they want to approve the domestic partnership law. In order to keep the domestic partnership law, voters have to vote to approve it.

It won’t go back to the laws passed in 2008 and 2007, but it will roll back a significant number of legal protections. It won’t wipe away all the laws. But that would be akin to saying to a married couple, We are going to take away some of the rights you have as a married couple but you can still be married.
Rejecting this law would irreparably harm a number of families across the state.

There are now more than 12,000 people in Washington who are registered in domestic partnerships. That is the number of people whose lives will be impacted.

These people live in every county, in every part of the state. So if the laws are rejected, their legal protections will be stripped away and they’ll be left without an essential safety net in essence and particularly in times of crisis. We’ve all seen the unfortunate tragedies that happen in life and what happens when a family does not have the protections. (more…)

Tags: R71, referendum 71, Thursday Q&A

For this week’s Thursday Q&A, I sat down with Tim Eyman, supporter of Initiative 1033. Below is the entire interview, unedited.

Want to hear what the other side has to say? Tune in next Thursday, when we’ll post what Mike Ragan of the Washington Education Association has to say…

Q: Tell me what I-1033 does in your own words.
Eyman: 1033 addresses two very big concerns that we’ve heard from our supporters over the years. One is the out of control property tax problem in our state and the fiscal roller coaster of state, counties and cities. What 1033 does is it says that the government can grow and it can grow at the same rate as the private sector grows at and if they want to get more tax revenue for that, then they have to go to voters and ask their permission. So that gets us off the fiscal roller coaster. When it comes to property taxes, the initiative says that if the government collects more money than is the cap that 1033 institutes that that excess money, first a fixed percentage goes into a rainy day fund, but above that has to be refunded to taxpayers via lower property tax.

What that does is addresses those two very real concerns – it lowers property tax burden not by reducing the size of government, but by controlling the growth.

The state, the counties and the cities are bigger now than they’ve ever been. They’re not as big as they had planned on being but they are still bigger than they were before and that’s because they got on the fiscal roller coaster. (more…)

Tags: 1033, Eyman, Thursday Q&A