From Brian Zylstra at the Secretary of State’s Office: “Attorney General’s Office was informed this afternoon by the judicial assistant for Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee that Larry Stickney has voluntarily dismissed his ballot title challenge to Referendum 71. Because the challenge has been dropped, the original wording in Referendum 71’s ballot title and ballot summary will remain in effect. The referendum’s sponsors will have to include the ballot title and ballot summary language on their signature petitions. R-71 sponsors need to turn in a minimum of 120,577 valid voter signatures by July 25.”

What’s that all mean: As soon as sign-up sheets are printed, they can start collecting signatures for the initiative against expansion of domestic partnership.

Tags: Domestic partner

Joe Turner reports: Bryan Zylstra at the Secretary of State’s office says Referendum 71 — the initiative against the expansion of domestic partnership laws — will get a court hearing on Tuesday at 10 a.m. in Thurston County District Court.

The backers of the initiative filed an appeal because they don’t like the ballot title and some of the language.

Check back Tuesday for an update on how the hearing goes. Here’s more on the language of the initiative and what the sponsors want it changed to.

Tags: domestic partners

Karen Lee and Dr. Arun Raha — the experts in employment and economic issues in Washington state — sat down with Austin Jenkins for tonight’s edition of Inside Olympia.

Here’s a bit of what they had to say, courtesy of TVW’s Mike Bay, who took notes:

- Raha, the state’s chief economic forecaster, said state revenues will lag behind recovery. He doesn’t expect fiscal 2011 revenues to match fiscal 2008’s.

- Lee, who runs the state’s Employment Security Department, said she expects “a long and difficult road for us to get out of this recession.” She cautioned that employment growth would lag the economic recovery. Raha agreed.

- Lee said the biggest challenge facing the ESD and workers is that the post-recovery economy will look a lot different, the old jobs won’t come back, and it will be critical for blue-collar workers to learn totally new skills. She noted you don’t have to be on unemployment to take advantage of ESD’s retraining opportunities.

All that and much, much more on tonight’s Inside Olympia. I’ll post here as soon as it’s available online. Or watch it on TVW at 7 and 10 p.m.

Tags: Arun Raha, economy, Inside Olympia, Karen Lee, unemployment

The New York Times has an interesting post up about a freshman reading program at Washington State University that was recently canceled and promptly reinstated.

Though the 4,000 books were purchased, the university — after sustaining $54 million in cuts from the state — said it just couldn’t afford to continue the program.

Some thought the issue had more to do with politics than the budget: The book in question was Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which traces many social problems to industrial agriculture.

After canceling the program, it’s now back on: A lawyer and “Distinguished Alumnus,” Bill Marler, offered to pony up the cash for the program.

Tags: new york times, washington state university

The Olympian and THe Department of Ecology are reporting that 500 pounds of glue and laminate were washed into wetlands near Chehalis today as firefighters tried to extinguish a large fire at a truss and beam factory.

The Department of Ecology is on the scene to assess the impact the glue — which contains the chemical phenol resorcinol and a catalyst — on the nearby waterways and wetlands.

About 60 people worked at the “Chehalis Lam,” as it was called, according to The Olympian. The fire is reported to have destroyed the plant.

Tags: department of ecology, wetlands

Joe Turner has the scoop on the end to the recession: Dr. Arun Raha, the state’s chief economic forecaster, has told the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers that he thinks things will turn around this summer.

One critical sentence: “The forecast assumes a ‘U’ shaped recovery.” What’s that mean? Like canyons, there are two basic recession shapes: U and V. U canyons are dug by slow-moving glaciers, U recessions spend a bit of time bouncing around at the trough before full recovery. So: Raha says he thinks the economy will stop getting worse in the third quarter of this year, but it will be until 2010 or 2011 before the economy really starts picking up again.

Read the whole preliminary report here.

Tags: Revenue forecast

Tags: The Impact

Jennifer Huntley, host of The Impact, sent this in about tonight’s show:

Three to four billion dollars of the federal stimulus money is being used in Washington state for Medicaid, K-12 education, higher education, and corrections. We’ll find out more about how the state is spending its share of the money. Joining us will be the Governor’s Chief of Staff Cindy Zehnder and Jill Satran, the Governor’s Executive Policy Advisor in charge of the federal stimulus.

Also, Gov. Chris Gregoire issued an executive order on climate change this past week. It directs the Department of Ecology to work with industries to cut emissions by 2020. Ecology Director Jay Manning says Washington state must lead on this issue so that the rest of the world will follow. We’ll find out more about what is in the order and how the Department of Ecology plans to carry it out.

Watch The Impact, tonight at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TVW or anytime online at tvw.org.

Tags: climate change, federal stimulus, Schools, The Impact

Washington schools will get $672 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — aka the federal stimulus package — $331 million will be available this fall, according to a release sent out by the U.S. Secretary of Education, Anne Duncan. That dwarfs the $194 million the state has received for education from the stimulus package so far.

The state plans to use all of the money in 2009 for elementary and secondary schools. In 2010, they’ll use most for elementary and secondary schools and about $100 million for public institutions of higher education.

According to the announcement, the additional funding comes after successfully completing the first portion of the state application.

“The $672 million Washington will receive today is part of the single largest boost in education funding in recent history,” Duncan said in the release. She said the state can use the money to “save jobs and lay the groundwork for a generation of education reform.”

To get the money, the state had to make a few promises. Gov. Chris Gregoire and state schools superintendent Randy Dorn signed the application, which you can read here, promising that they’d hold funding for elementary education at 2006 levels or above through fiscal year 2011. In 2006, the state spent $5.4 billion on education. In 2009, the budget is $6.5 billion — so education would have to get cut quite a bit to fall to 2006 levels.

They also pledged to “collect, publish, analyze and act on basic information regarding the quality of classroom teachers, annual student improvements, college readiness, the effectiveness of state standards and assessments, progress on removing charter caps and interventions in turning around underperforming schools.” And they must report back on how many jobs are saved by the boost and/or the amount of tax increases avoided.

One interesting thing about the application: Included in it (Attachment A, Section 4) is a program Gregoire ended up vetoing. The program would have directed funding to low-income areas for all-day kindergarten. She said at the time of the veto that all children deserved all-day kindergarten.

There’s also a part at the end that I don’t quite understand — it looks like some of the money for higher education may go toward reducing the tuition increase… Stay tuned.

Tags: cuts, federal stimulus, Gregoire, Schools

Last night, supporters of an initiative to prevent the expansion of domestic partnership filed an appeal to the Thurston County Superior Court on the proposed ballot language.

The proposed language was:
“…This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations of registered domestic partners and their families to include all rights, responsibilities, and obligations granted by or imposed by state law on married couples and their families.”

But Larry Stickney, the initiative backer who filed the appeal, proposed this:
“This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities and obligations of registered domestic partners to be equal to the rights, responsibilities and obligations granted by or imposed by state law on married couples, except that domestic partnerships will not be called marriages.”

The appeal will now be heard by the court, but that may be a few weeks, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Since the group cannot collect signatures until the appeal is heard and the language is determined, the appeal gives them less time to collect signatures. They need to get 120,577 signatures from valid, registered voters in the state of Washington by July 25 in order to get on the November ballot.

Tags: Domestic partnership, initiative