As news of the House’s proposed budget swept through Vancouver on Monday afternoon, the city’s legislative lobbyist had one thing to say: It could’ve been much worse.
The proposed House 2011-2013 budget, unveiled Monday, largely keeps funding sources for cities in place. Cuts to shared-revenue programs took just a 3.4 percent cut in the House budget, said Mark Brown, a legislative lobbyist for the cities of Vancouver, Battle Ground, Ridgefield, Longview and Lacey, during a Vancouver City Council workshop Monday.
“From a city-centric point of view, this is just much better than I expected,” he told the council. “We’ll lose in the tens of thousands (of dollars), not the hundreds of thousands.”
The budget pulls about $10 million from the money the state shares with cities and gives it to the state general fund. Cities will lose some of the liquor sales revenue, sales tax mitigation money and city-county assistance funds.
Among the planned capital budget money for Vancouver included in the House plan: $41,012 for improvements at East Minnehaha Neighborhood Park, and $600,000 for new roofs for buildings on Officers Row. The capital budget also included $500,000 for a park in the waterfront development along the Columbia River.
The state Senate is expected to release its budget as soon as this coming Monday, said Brown, adding that he expects it to be largely the same as the House version.
Regulation relief
Also on Monday, the Washington Senate passed House Bill 1478, a fiscal relief measure that gives local governments breathing room on deadlines for preparing expensive land-use and shoreline plans and converting their vehicle fleets to alternative fuels. In a 49-0 vote, the Senate passed the bill with a few tweaks, which will go back to the House for a concurrence vote, Brown said.
Pushing back deadlines gives cities time, as governments struggle to gain a financial foothold in the recession, he said.
“It’s real money for the city of Vancouver,” he said.
As passed by the Senate, HB 1478 would amend the Growth Management Act and the Shoreline Management Act, requiring cities and counties covered by the laws to update their plans every eight years rather than every seven years, as is now required.
The bill also extends the deadline for local governments to convert their fleets from gasoline and diesel to electricity, biodiesel or other alternative fuels under the state’s climate change strategy. The current state deadline is 2015; the bill would extend that deadline to 2018.
Brown said the fleet conversion could cost Vancouver $14 million, Battle Ground more than $1 million and Ridgefield $700,000, after figuring in the revenue they would recoup from selling their gas-powered vehicles.
“Without this change, we’d be spending (millions) changing out a fleet with many vehicles that are perfectly good,” Brown said.
Local governments also reached an agreement with the Department of Ecology that will extend existing stormwater permits by one year and require implementation of new permits no sooner than 2013, in effect providing a one-year delay, he said. That will give cities and counties a year to come up with funding sources to pay for new stormwater control systems. The same applies to new Department of Ecology rules dealing with reclaimed water facilities, he said. Such facilities capture stormwater and treated wastewater for use in irrigation and fire suppression.
“This is a great bill and this city played an integral role” in seeing it passed, Brown said.
