Dr. Pam Kohlmeier is one of four candidates seeking to replace longtime Spokane legislator Timm Ormsby in the Washington state House of Representatives. Kohlmeier is an emergency room physician.
TOMORROW: Natalie Poulson
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
DN: Pam, why did you decide to run this year?
Pam Kohlmeier: The honest reason is we lost a child to suicide three years ago and I've done everything I can to help raise awareness about mental health. I joined multiple boards involved with that and it's not enough. So I'm trying to help improve funding and awareness at the state level.
DN: Where would you pull the funding for something like that?
PK: Well, the tough thing is, is that it's really all of health care that I'm trying to help stabilize right now.
You and I met a couple of months ago talking about Prosperity Eastern Washington, trying to save rural health. All of health care is kind of under attack right now with HR1, funding cuts federally, so the state really has to step up to help make sure that health care access is available for all of us in the state. Behavioral health is already underfunded and so having someone with a health care background, I'm an ER doctor, with that awareness of the unintended consequences of not funding it appropriately, actually costs the state more in the long term. Jails, all this stuff. So having that perspective will help a lot in the legislature.
DN: You've just been talking about this, but what are the issues that are most important to you as you go to Olympia?
PK: It's really funding the things that helps communities thrive. Those would be fully funding education, making sure that the health care system is stable, which right now it is not, prioritizing things that keep us safe.
Right now, our homeless crisis is really an issue in the Third Legislative District, elsewhere in the state too, but especially here. So really focusing on those issues, so that all of us feel safer in the community, and we all have the ability to thrive.
DN: What do you think about the state's tax system? There's been a lot of talk about the state taxing people too much in order to be able to raise the money that is needed for the priorities that you're talking about. How do you feel about that? Do you, for example, support the idea of an income tax for the most wealthy individuals?
PK: That's a complex question. The root of taxation is it should be fair and it's kind of impossible to get everyone to accept that a tax system could be fair, but right now we have one of the most regressive tax systems out there, which is horrible. We so heavily tax people that really can hardly afford to live, and so we have to flip that so that people that have the ability to pay are the ones that are actually providing a huge amount of money to help with our economy, and our schools, and all the funding that we talked about.
The reality is, is that we also are a community in the state of laws, and so we have to make sure that our tax code complies with our own state constitution and it'll be up to the state's Supreme Court to determine if the millionaire's tax complies with that. If it doesn't, we have to get creative as a state to make sure we are having the ultra-wealthy be the ones that are taxed, but complying with the Constitution.
So I would propose a tweak of, if we can't do it to individuals with their individual tax system, to tax the corporations that are paying those really high salaries to those people, because if the corporations that can afford to pay a CEO multi-millions of dollars, if we can't tax the multi-million dollars of the person earning it, we could tax the person providing it, if that makes sense. So having still the people who have the ability to pay, paying more, because right now what we're doing is not working for anyone.
DN: The state's budget has increased quite a lot over the last 10 to 20 years. Is the state spending too much?
PK: Yes, there have to be places that there can be cuts.
I was a policy manager, staff attorney for the Washington Medical Commission that licenses and disciplines doctors, so I understand what it's like to be a government employee and what it's like to work for the state. I also got to witness in that role that there are areas that there can be cuts.
Having said that, cutting programs like child care access for really low socioeconomic families is not the answer. Cutting more funding to education is not the answer. What we have to do is we have to make sure that someone who has a fresh set of eyes, like myself and many others, comes in and asks the questions of why is it that we're funding so much for this? Taking tours of some of the buildings.
When I worked for the Medical Commission, I was not alone in working remotely. I was working from my home on the South Hill of Spokane, but I was based in Olympia. I would go to Olympia every six weeks for a commission meeting. The Department of Health building, where the Commission was housed, used to be full of employees because people worked on site. Because of COVID, as awful as COVID was, the aftermath is some people chose to continue working remotely, and in some ways that's good for jobs.
For people on the east side of the state, you can work for the Department of Health or somewhere else based in Olympia, but it also freed up a lot of wasted office space and so, to continue to own the building or pay the rent and pay the heat and the custodian, it's a waste. And so making sure that we are only funding what we have to with what we're paying.
DN: So it sounds like your priorities for funding are the social issues and education and a lot of the things that are at that basic social safety net.
PK: Absolutely. Yeah, a lot of the debate ends up later about like, well, do we have to pay more for the jails and whatnot?
If you fully fund education, you make sure that people have access to health care at very young ages so they can get diagnosed early when there are problems. They are more likely to be able to thrive, have good jobs, contribute more to the tax system themselves. If you don't fund their education well enough, they don't have access to health care, they don't have food, they don't have housing, they're more likely to end up in jails and then you need to have conversations about how do we fund more jails, which is not where the discussion should be. It should be how do we help people early on so they can be productive individuals that thrive.
