Morning Fizz
Dispatches from Last Night's City and County Budget Hearings
1. Fizz was at last night's city council budget hearing in Northgate.
Reps from a library advocacy group, Streets for All (a bike and ped activist group), SHARE (the homeless advocacy group), and SCAN TV (a public access TV network) dominated the mike.
Plus, there were a few mostly older folks wearing "Lindy Hop" vests and hard hats, supporting Linden Ave. N. sidewalk improvements.
The only real excitement was when a guy in the front row yelled that the SCAN folks---who would lose all their city funding under the mayor's budget---were "out if order" because they had so many folks standing up and saying the same thing. Council budget chair Jean Godden (one of the six council members who showed up) agreed and asked them to let other folks speak.
(Not on hand: Bruce Harrell, Nick Licata, and Tom Rasmussen).
2. Fizz was also at last night's King County Council budget hearing. Here's a dispatch:
After the hearing, we asked Republican Council Member Kathy Lambert for her take on the cuts King County Executive Dow Constantine announced on Monday.
"He did a good job creating a sustainable budget," said Lambert, who represents the 3rd district, which starts in Sammamish and Redmond and sprawls all the way to the eastern border of the county.
"People are saying that we're cutting from the criminal justice budget just to scare people. Well, no," she said. (County Executive Dow Constantine, facing a $60 million budget shortfall, has recommended drastic cuts to social services and criminal justice. "We're cutting it because we've cut everything else," said Lambert, whose biggest concern was cuts to the Court Appointed Special Advocate program. The program assigns a legal advocate to abused children who are going through the legal system and are under the age of 11. "I was sick to my stomach. But, we don't have any money."
Lambert seemed particularly rattled by a speaker at the budget hearing named Paul W. Locke, an anti-government gadfly who said he was glad to see "the dismantling of county government."
"It makes me sad when people say, 'let's get rid of government,'" said Lambert. "Government is people. Saying you don't want government is like saying you don't want a family anymore."
3. The latest Rasmussen Reports polling has U.S. Sen Patty Murray and GOP challenger Dino Rossi all tied up again—Rossi 48 to Murray 47—putting it back in the "toss-up" category.
Rasmussen had the race "Leans Democrat" two weeks ago when their polling had Murray up 51 to 46.
4. There's a ping-pong match going on between the Murray and Rossi camps over who's to blame for blocking the sales tax deduction.
During the last week, Democrats and Republicans offered up bills to extend the sales tax deduction on federal income taxes (worth about $600 annually to Washington families). And both sides slapped the other down.
The latest proposal, offered up by Sen. Murray last night as the clock ran out before the election recess, failed when GOP Sen. John Thune (R-SD) objected.
With dueling press releases, both sides are casting the other as obstructionist. Rossi's camp says the Republicans didn't have time to read Murray's proposal. Murray's camp says the proposal was "virually identical" to the one the GOP offered on Monday. (The difference? The GOP extension was permanent. Murray's was a one-year extension.)
Ultimately, here's the deal: The Democratic proposal, originally sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus, was paid for by cutting corporate and investment fund tax loopholes ("tax increases," according to the Rossi camp) while also funding bio-fuel and green economy investments.
A Republican proposal, advocated by Thune, was paid for by ending the stimulus, freezing federal salaries, and other (GOP "same old same old" according to the Murray camp).
Judge for yourself:
Here's Thune explaining his version last week:
(Thune is holding a fundraiser for Dino Rossi next week in D.C.)
And here's Baucus' bill (You'll find the offsets—the corporate loopholes he wanted to close—on page 17).
Reps from a library advocacy group, Streets for All (a bike and ped activist group), SHARE (the homeless advocacy group), and SCAN TV (a public access TV network) dominated the mike.
Plus, there were a few mostly older folks wearing "Lindy Hop" vests and hard hats, supporting Linden Ave. N. sidewalk improvements.
The only real excitement was when a guy in the front row yelled that the SCAN folks---who would lose all their city funding under the mayor's budget---were "out if order" because they had so many folks standing up and saying the same thing. Council budget chair Jean Godden (one of the six council members who showed up) agreed and asked them to let other folks speak.
(Not on hand: Bruce Harrell, Nick Licata, and Tom Rasmussen).
2. Fizz was also at last night's King County Council budget hearing. Here's a dispatch:
After the hearing, we asked Republican Council Member Kathy Lambert for her take on the cuts King County Executive Dow Constantine announced on Monday.
"He did a good job creating a sustainable budget," said Lambert, who represents the 3rd district, which starts in Sammamish and Redmond and sprawls all the way to the eastern border of the county.
"People are saying that we're cutting from the criminal justice budget just to scare people. Well, no," she said. (County Executive Dow Constantine, facing a $60 million budget shortfall, has recommended drastic cuts to social services and criminal justice. "We're cutting it because we've cut everything else," said Lambert, whose biggest concern was cuts to the Court Appointed Special Advocate program. The program assigns a legal advocate to abused children who are going through the legal system and are under the age of 11. "I was sick to my stomach. But, we don't have any money."
Lambert seemed particularly rattled by a speaker at the budget hearing named Paul W. Locke, an anti-government gadfly who said he was glad to see "the dismantling of county government."
"It makes me sad when people say, 'let's get rid of government,'" said Lambert. "Government is people. Saying you don't want government is like saying you don't want a family anymore."
3. The latest Rasmussen Reports polling has U.S. Sen Patty Murray and GOP challenger Dino Rossi all tied up again—Rossi 48 to Murray 47—putting it back in the "toss-up" category.
Rasmussen had the race "Leans Democrat" two weeks ago when their polling had Murray up 51 to 46.
4. There's a ping-pong match going on between the Murray and Rossi camps over who's to blame for blocking the sales tax deduction.
During the last week, Democrats and Republicans offered up bills to extend the sales tax deduction on federal income taxes (worth about $600 annually to Washington families). And both sides slapped the other down.
The latest proposal, offered up by Sen. Murray last night as the clock ran out before the election recess, failed when GOP Sen. John Thune (R-SD) objected.
With dueling press releases, both sides are casting the other as obstructionist. Rossi's camp says the Republicans didn't have time to read Murray's proposal. Murray's camp says the proposal was "virually identical" to the one the GOP offered on Monday. (The difference? The GOP extension was permanent. Murray's was a one-year extension.)
Ultimately, here's the deal: The Democratic proposal, originally sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus, was paid for by cutting corporate and investment fund tax loopholes ("tax increases," according to the Rossi camp) while also funding bio-fuel and green economy investments.
A Republican proposal, advocated by Thune, was paid for by ending the stimulus, freezing federal salaries, and other (GOP "same old same old" according to the Murray camp).
Judge for yourself:
Here's Thune explaining his version last week:
The way I do this is I fully offset this by spending cuts, including medical malpractice reform, a freeze on Federal salaries, reductions in wasteful, duplicative, and excessive government spending, rescinding unspent Federal funds including the stimulus, an expansion of the affordability exception to the individual mandate that was included in the recently passed health care reform bill and by disposing of unused and unneeded Federal property.
(Thune is holding a fundraiser for Dino Rossi next week in D.C.)
And here's Baucus' bill (You'll find the offsets—the corporate loopholes he wanted to close—on page 17).
