By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Midway through this year’s short legislative session in Olympia, Zach Carstensen was nervous. The director of government affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, who lobbies on behalf of the Jewish community as a whole, didn’t know if his primary objectives would be fulfilled.
“Legislators and the governor were more cautious than they have been. The Democrats have huge majorities in both chambers,” Carstensen said. “Going into an election, leadership and the governor are very conscious of that, and they didn’t want to overreach, but they also wanted to make progress for real people.”
When both the House and Gov. Christine Gregoire released their versions of the supplemental budget, Carstensen’s highest priority, a $255,000 one-time grant to the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center for artifact preservation and education, was nowhere to be found.
The Senate’s version, released several days later, however, included the funding. The budget currently awaiting a signature from the governor included the line item in full.
“In a supplemental budget year, the goal isn’t necessarily to create new policies,” Carstensen said, “so when you factor in that reality…and the impact that they’re obviously going to make, I think it’s clearly the biggest victory for the community this year.”
Delilah Simon, co-executive director of WSHERC, said her staff was “jumping up and down” with the news.
The funding will mainly be used to take recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors, currently stored on Beta tape that’s at the end of its lifecycle, and “transfer this information in the most efficient, modern way, using current technology,” Simon said.
In addition, the funding will allow the center to obtain testimonies and artifacts that have yet to be collected.
“The funding is not going to our operating budget,” Simon noted. “These are projects that needed to be done in order to preserve these materials so that they [can] be used” for educational purposes across the state.
Five thousand dollars of the grant will go to the Washington State Historical Society to administer the funds.
The Federation’s other main priority was Senate Bill 5868, which filled a loophole from previous legislation the Anti-Defamation League had lobbied on to define civil disorder training.
“The existing law made it illegal to knowingly train others to commit what are known as violent public disturbances, and the language said ‘intended to hurt people,’” said Hilary Bernstein, interim director of the ADL’s Pacific Northwest chapter. “The loophole was that it didn’t say ‘to destroy property,’ and so this new…bill that Washington passed closed that loophole.”
The bill was introduced by Sen. Adam Kline (D-S. Seattle). It passed the Senate unanimously and with two “no” votes in the House. It awaits the governor’s signature.
Several budget line items bolstered social services, which benefit such organizations as Jewish Family Service.
These included welfare grant increases of $7.8 million, or about 3 percent, to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which Carstensen said has not been increased since the 1990s; $1.1 million to expand the food stamp program, which will now qualify residents with income up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level; and $656,000 to expand naturalization services and assist in alleviating naturalization fee increases.
To help struggling low- and moderate-income families, the legislature passed Senate Bill 6809, “because the state relies so heavily on sales tax revenue, families in Washington with the lowest incomes pay proportionately four or five times as much in state taxes as the most affluent households,” according to the bill’s language.
“It’s the first time Washington State has developed a tax rebate for low-income people that’s pegged to their earned income tax credit returns,” Carstensen said. The $1.2 million allocated this year is to set up the program, with a goal of refunding an additional 10 percent of the earned-income tax credit to those who qualify.
“Gas is going up, food’s getting more expensive, and in a state with no income tax but a fairly sizeable sales tax, low income people bear the brunt of that,” Carstensen said.
The state’s Housing Trust Fund, which JTNews has reported on previously, ended up receiving a $70 million increase, halfway between the two chambers’ proposed budgets.
The Caroline Kline Galland and Associates nursing home and assisted-living facility dealt with two issues in this year’s session: one was a 3 percent Medicaid increase to the budget, which “was good news, but not great news,” said Kline Galland CEO Jeff Cohn.
Because of inflationary pressure, he added, the increase helps but still leaves the nursing facility in a deficit.
A defeated piece of legislation, House Bill 3110, would have put the Kline Galland’s property tax exemption into jeopardy, if, according to the language, “The ratio of medicaid [sic] patient days to total patient days at the nursing home was at or above fifty percent according to the most recent annual nursing home cost report data.”
The 50 percent threshold, Cohn said, is “completely an arbitrary number.” Where Carstensen said that number can change from year to year, “it actually fluctuates from day to day,” Cohn said. In addition, he said, “it doesn’t take into account the millions that Kline Galland spends every year to make up for the shortfall of Medicaid.”
At a cost of $250 per bed per day, and with Medicaid reimbursements of $170 for its recipients, the numbers add up, he said.
Carstensen also noted that nonprofits are based on “community benefit.” Kline Galland is the only Jewish nursing home in Washington State, and one of two in Washington and Oregon.
“As I told one legislator,” he said, “‘It’s the only facility that if you’re Jewish, you know that you’re not going to get a ham sandwich served to you every day at lunch.’ I think these subjective criteria are helpful in measuring community benefits.”
The last successful bill the Federation stood behind was HB 3104, which granted probate and asset-transfer rights to domestic partnerships. It has been signed by the governor.
Though the local Jewish community holds a range of views on whether the state should support same-sex partnerships or whether this bill, the second to pass in as many years after nearly 30 years of failure, will lead to same sex marriage, Carstensen said the Federation did not take a qualitative perspective on the issue.
“We’re a philanthropic organization and we have a real interest in ensuring the seamless transfer of assets, whether they be same-sex or different-sex couples,” he said.
Where the Jewish community did not fare as well were with two bills, one supported by the Federation as well as the National Council for Jewish Women’s Seattle section, HB 3095, that would have restricted firearm ownership from anyone who had been involuntarily committed by the state, died in committee.
While both Carstensen and Kristen Comer, executive director of the Washington Ceasefire gun control organization, a strong supporter of the bill, attributed the bill’s failure partly to the short session, Comer said there were some deeper issues.
“The primary issue with some of the gun rights organizations was the difference in the burden of proof in the initial 14-day [commitment] period and the 90-day period,” Comer said. The 90-day commitment period has a higher standard of judicial scrutiny, and Comer believes that some opponents had concerns about the different standards.
“You don’t really overhaul the mental health commitment system in a firearms bill,” she said.
Virginia passed similar legislation this year in the aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech, and a bill passed at the federal level means keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill is an issue every state will have to deal with.
Had the measure passed, “it would have put us in a better position to receive grant funding if the state had shown an initiative to really address the issue on the foreground, rather than when every other state is scrambling to meet the regulations,” Comer said.
While Carstensen said the bill was “pretty non-controversial,” it apparently raised enough eyebrows to keep it from advancing in the session’s compressed timeframe.
“Hopefully we’ll be smarter next year,” Comer said.
NCJW had also stood behind SB 6189, which would have required “that each pharmacy comply with its duty to timely dispense all legally prescribed drugs and devices or the therapeutic equivalent in order to meet the pharmaceutical needs of its patients.”
While related to the “Plan B” birth control medication, this bill would have covered all types of medication. Rep. Karen Keiser, who had sponsored the bill, pulled the legislation, citing a lawsuit filed by pharmacists protesting Plan B requirements. NCJW executive director Lauren Simonds was out of town and unavailable for comment.