Today's headlines:
- Washington Governor Jay Inslee is backing the states so-called Millionaire's Tax, but other past governors aren't.
- With a lack of snow this past winter, studies from Colorado School of Mines show what this could mean for upcoming winters.]
- Julia Payne, one of the three people for running for 6th District House seat in Spokane, sits down with SPR to explain her reason for flipping the seat.
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Washington’s former governors are split over the state’s new tax-the-rich policy. State government reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan has more.
Former Governor Jay Inslee has come out in support of the state’s so-called millionaires tax. He says he would have signed it into law had it come across his desk.
The new tax passed in March and will take a nearly 10 percent cut of incomes over a million dollars starting in 2029.
Democrats in Olympia say revenue from the measure is needed to plug a budget hole, and fund education programs and sales tax breaks.
But two other former Democratic governors aren’t so sure about the millionaires tax. Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire have not endorsed it. Instead, they say that Democrats need to get their spending under control.
Conservative PAC Let’s Go Washington has put forward an initiative to voters to repeal the tax in November.
I'm Sarah Mizes-Tan reporting.
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The severe lack of snow in the West this past winter was made much more likely by global warming – and could be a sign of what’s to come. The Mountain West News Bureau's Rachel Cohen reports.
The dismal winter wasn’t just a fluke, says Adrienne Marshall, an assistant professor at Colorado School of Mines.
A new study she coauthored found the low snowpack measured across the West in mid-March was about four and a half times more likely because of the warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
MARSHALL: “A bad snow year in the climate we're living in now is substantially worse than what we would have had in the absence of climate change.”
The researchers estimate the amount of water missing from this year’s snowpack was enough to fill Lake Mead – which supplies water to millions of people and farms across the southwest, and supports hydropower.
If greenhouse gas emissions remain high, the modeling suggests snow droughts this severe could become more common - as often as one out of every three years by the middle of the century.
For the Mountain West News Bureau, I’m Rachel Cohen
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Washington Department of Health officials are warning people about a “spoofing” scam involving their agency. They say someone appears to call from a number associated with the Department of Health. They say the person on the other end claims your personal medical information has been obtained by others and they ask you to verify details about yourself. Agency officials say don’t do that and they refer people to a state attorney general’s webpage with advice for dealing with robocalls and other telemarketing scams.
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Spokane Democrat Julia Payne is looking to flip a Spokane legislative seat from red to blue. Payne is running for the 6th District state House seat held by Republican Jenny Graham. Graham is retiring from the legislature.
Payne spends much of her time doing community-centered work and
advocating for local groups.
Julia Payne: I have spent years volunteering with Pride and doing that sort of thing and just being out and talking to people and being in the
public and being representative of the people that came to me and trusted me with their stories. It just felt like the next step.
DN: So what kind of influence do you hope to have as a state legislator?
JP: My goal is really the visibility of somebody that uses a wheelchair, uses a cane to get around, saying I'm still perfectly capable of being here and representing you. I'm somebody that's never been financially rich. We are financially stable after many years of struggling to get there.
I'm also a mom of a young man who identifies as the LGBTQ community. I'm a foster mom. I've helped homeless kids. I can walk around downtown Spokane and a bunch of the kids come running up and call me auntie.
I want to be a person that goes to Olympia and says we need to be seeing these people and we need to be hearing these people and we need to be helping these people. And so I feel like being middle class like that and being on the ground is going to be my biggest influence.
DN: I think you got an endorsement from the local Democratic Party, is that correct?
JP: I did.
DN: So you've been around them, you've been around elected officials in Olympia. What have you learned from your experiences being around elected officials as to what the job might be about?
JP: I actually had a wonderful opportunity to go and do a training with the Vote Lead Run Action group and they gave us just a priceless opportunity to actually speak with three individuals that are active representatives. One of them started her 20 minutes with us individually by saying I'm going to tell you how a bill really becomes a bill, or becomes law.
She said Schoolhouse Rock lied to us, and so learning the ins and outs of that process, seeing the people walking the halls of the Capitol Building in Olympia and having those conversations, it really brought it down to earth for me.
I looked at what these people were doing and said wait, I'm capable of doing that. It doesn't require a law degree. It doesn't require 20 years of experience in this, that, or the other thing. It just requires the ability to have a conversation, listen to what the other side has to say, and then try to find a compromise because the art of compromise is that nobody's happy but everybody can live with it. And that is something I'm pretty good at.
I have utilized those skills several times working with Pride and the other groups and volunteering, even communicating with police officers who were dealing with unruly teenagers downtown. I've helped defuse those situations. And I want to take that strength and that experience and go to Olympia and start making some changes.
The cost of living, you know, affordability is the key word to everybody right now, but I do feel that some of the people who are using those words don't quite understand them. If you haven't had to work a completely opposite shift of your spouse and not see them for months on end because you can't afford daycare, if you haven't had to dig in the couch cushions for milk because your kid wants cereal for breakfast, can you truly understand affordability? If you haven't had those experiences, the next best thing you can do is go talk to people who have had those experiences and ask them how they get through it.
Now I've lived those experiences. Now there's plenty of experiences I haven't lived, but I feel like it gives me a pretty good view on where we need to make some changes so that the people who are struggling aren't
taking on the full burden of everything. So our recessive tax code is definitely one that I want to address and be a part of the conversation.
Julia Payne is one of three people – and the only Democrat -- running for the 6th District House seat held by Jenny Graham.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Mizes-Tan, Rachel Cohen and Doug Nadvornick.
Jordy Jones hosts the show. Doug Nadvornick produces it.
Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
