In Our View, March 1: Training Workers

Tim Probst’s background and expertise in work-force issues and job training programs are paying big dividends as the first-term state representative maneuvers through his second legislative session. One of his most promising efforts is a bill that would create an Opportunity Express program with two dramatic benefits: a tax break for small businesses and a boost in job training programs of about 10,000 positions.

Probst’s House Bill 2630 is the product of innovative thinking and deserves support and expedient approval by his colleagues. The bill is as complex as the issue of work-force training, but Probst has the savvy needed to design and explain the program. In basic terms and excluding the required minutiae nestled within HB 2630, Opportunity Express would work like this:

Small-business owners would be allowed to make a one-time contribution to the job-training program, and then have 110 percent of that contribution returned in the form of a tax credit on unemployment insurance taxes. The employers’ contributions would fund about 10,000 statewide job-training positions in high-demand fields, with overall cost capped at about $55 million. Revenue the state would lose to the employers’ tax credit would be made up by using about half of a new $98 million federal funding program. The remainder would go to the administrative and other costs of the unemployment insurance trust fund.

And here is where the benefits of Probst’s out-of-the-box thinking start to mount. Retraining workers is one of the governmental functions that Washington state does best. For countless people, the search for a different kind of work becomes more desperate and accelerated in tough economic times. Worker retraining enrollments statewide grew 39 percent in early 2008 and 50 percent in early 2009, driven primarily by a jobless rate that soared from 5.4 percent to over 9 percent.

This Great Recession has left our state gasping for relief on two fronts: First, small-business owners need help, and HB 2630 would be a powerful incentive not only to stay in business but to grow. Second, we have growing brigades of unemployed people, who would receive new opportunities in jobs with promising futures — in aerospace, health care, long-term care, advanced manufacturing, construction, renewable energy industries and other high-demand occupations. These employer-worker sectors are represented by two of the strongest supporters of Probst’s bill: the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce and Clark College, which has positioned itself as a chief solutions-provider for economic recovery with highly successful job training programs.

But that support is not universal. Status-quo worshippers are leery of Probst’s creativity. Some complain that a tax credit has never been placed on unemployment insurance taxes before. That’s a weak argument — and, remember, Probst is proposing only a one-time tax credit. Others want all $98 million of the federal money sent to the unemployment insurance trust fund, although about $43 million still would go in that direction. Some insist the money should be used to upgrade the unemployment insurance computer system, but Probst points out that that upgrade would take three or four years. The dual needs — tax credits for small-business owners and increased job-training slots — are more immediate.

Probst’s uncle was the first person in his family to attend college, and it was paid for by the G.I. Bill. That partly explains Probst’s passion for helping jobless people find work. The rest of the explanation is found in the type of creative mind that conjures up the twin triumphs of HB 2630. Legislators should recognize that employers and job-seekers need Opportunity Express, and act accordingly.