The city of Vancouver’s lobbyist — who represents the city’s interests in Olympia — told council members this week to get ready to start playing defense.
“We have been told that the (state) budget is likely going to be a ‘no new tax’ budget,” Mark Brown, the lobbyist, told councilors during a regular legislative update on Monday evening. “Any program, like shared state revenues or general funds and its funding source will be in harm’s way, because there is no other way you can address the budget pressures with existing revenues.”
For the city of Vancouver, that could mean more than $5 million in shared tax dollars from liquor, marijuana, criminal justice and fire insurance premiums could be swiped by the state.
The Washington state Legislature is in the midst of the 2017 legislative session. The biggest priority for lawmakers is to solve the state’s chronic underfunding of public schools.
The budget Brown referred to would be a proposal by the Senate Republicans but would likely change throughout the negotiating process.
Brown also gave city councilors what he considered good news on Monday night.
Two measures aimed at streamlining the state’s public records law are gaining momentum. Two House bills would expand training provisions for agencies addressing public records requests and give them the ability to get advice from the attorney general’s office on how to handle the requests properly.
“We have a mandatory training provision now, but we still see a lot of misunderstanding of how the public records act is supposed to work,” said Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, which was initially opposed to the measures but is now hopeful they will help increase transparency.
House Bill 1594 would also help create a statewide public records request portal, giving agencies a way to track public record requests and allow for local government technology improvement grants to help agencies respond to requests sooner. It authorizes a $1 surcharge on county recording fees to fund the grant program.
“When you really get down to it, what this is all about is how do we give agencies the ability to deal with these extremely large, abusive requests for hundreds of thousands or millions of records,” Nixon said.
Nixon said he was hoping to see some of the charges decreased. As the measure is currently drafted, it would be 15 cents a page for paper photocopies; he was advocating for 10 cents. House Bill 1595 would also prohibit requests that ask for “all” or “substantially all” of an agency’s records.
The city of Vancouver received 998 public records requests in 2016 and spent 1,735 hours processing them.
The city is in favor of both state measures.
“Public disclosure serves a very important purpose in local government: Being able to produce relevant records for legitimate public purposes is critical for local government maintain and building credibility and accountability with those we serve,” Vancouver City Manager Eric Holmes wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, a few individuals and organizations have used the system to create a disproportionate burden in some cities in Washington, particularly some smaller cities.”
