State Senator Brad Hawkins holds District 12 Listening Tour

PATEROS – Washington State Senator Brad Hawkins, representing the four-county 12th District that includes part of Okanogan County, visited Pateros and Winthrop as part of a three-day Listening Tour last Friday, Oct. 6. 

Hawkins said he conceived the Listening Tour “primarily to inform myself on issues that are important to people here before I go over to Olympia. Sometimes when you are over there in the middle of a legislative session it’s difficult to be proactive on the issues during the middle of a session because things are already in motion.”

Capital Facilities Budget

In an exclusive interview with the Quad City Herald last Friday, Senator Hawkins responded to questions submitted by officials from the Bridgeport-Brewster-Pateros communities.

High on the list of concerns for Pateros mayor, Carlene Anders, was passage of the state’s $4 billion Capital Facilities Budget (CFB).

Of the state’s three budgets, Operating ($44 billion), Transportation ($9 billion) and Capital ($4 billion) the latter still awaits the Legislature’s approval.

Hawkins acknowledged that failure to pass the CFB has created a hardship for communities, like Pateros, “that have funding for their facilities already in the pipeline,”

Hawkins added that school districts that have passed bonds with a 60 percent vote, as Brewster and Bridgeport have recently, also qualify for matching state funds so they are hampered as well by the failure to pass the CFB.

“My hope was we would get it passed this fall,” said Hawkins. “The legislators are getting together in mid-November for what is called Committee Days; it’s not a special session but if there’s an opportunity to take action on the capital budget at that time I would welcome it.”

Hawkins said that the legislature has a negotiated CFB between the House and Senate, “that is pretty much ready to go so it’s not really an issue of if we pass the capital budget but more of an issue of when,” but added that the recent Hirst water rights decision by the state Supreme Court is a pressing tandem issue that also needs to be resolved.

“The Hirst situation has multi-generational impacts with respect to kids and grandkids, peoples’ family property, the value of their property, access to water, rural development. It’s a big, big deal,” Hawkins said.

Some state legislators are determined that the CFB will not be passed until Hirst is settled.

Public Works Assistant Account

Bridgeport mayor Janet Conklin asked that the senator continue to work on behalf of small communities. Key to that effort is the state’s Public Works Assistant Account (PWAA) that Bridgeport has used in the past for infrastructure funding. 

“The PWAA is a competitive process for local governments - cities, counties, sewer districts, water districts - to compete for low interest loans,” said Hawkins. “It’s not free money but an opportunity to fund infrastructure projects without the cumbersome process of going through a bond where you have to borrow at market rates.”

Hawkins said the 2012 state Supreme Court McCleary Decision mandating the state to fully fund education shifted the legislative focus to K-12 funding that “sometimes makes funding some of the other programs more challenging and in the past the Public Works Trust Fund has been victim of that.”

“Out of the $44 billion two-year budget, K-12 education is approximately half of that,” the Senator said.

Hawkins added however that PWAA is “really popular particularly in Eastern Washington and that there is renewed support to restore funding the in the future.”

Public Records Act

Brewster city clerk Misty Ruiz said that city staffers are looking for some support for or adjustments to requests for public records that saddle city government with excessive demands to supply that information.

“We only have one staff member who does that work and some requests can take years to complete,” said Ruiz. Not all our records are computerized so that requires time-consuming hours devoted to the examination of paper records.

The Public Records Act (PRA), first adopted by voters in 1972 through Initiative 276, requires, with few designated exceptions, that all public records gathered and maintained by local and state agencies be made available to the public.

“Transparency of the government is important,” said Hawkins, “but there certainly have been some abuses of the Public Records Act.”

Hawkins said that in the last legislative session, one PRA modification called Identifiable Records allows a government entity to request more clarification of a records request.

Hawkins said it might make sense to limit PRA requests to in-state requesters and not allow out-of-state requesters for commercial benefit. He related an example of out-of-state graduate assistants utilizing the PRA law to perform much of their research. 

Added to the search burden is the requirement that certain privacy data to be redacted which requires a page-by-page review to comply with regulatory law.

Hawkins said that when the legislature could not resolve the PRA debate a couple of years ago, it commissioned a study from the William D. Ruckelshaus Center that should soon be releasing some recommendations concerning PRA access.