By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
When Zach Carstensen heads to Olympia this Monday, he’ll be focusing on Holocaust education. Following last year’s unsuccessful efforts to win an allocation in the state budget for the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, Carstensen, the director of government affairs for the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, is hoping to lobby state legislators to earmark $255,000 for a one-time grant that would satisfy the growing demand for resources from the Seattle-based teaching organization.
“It’s an urgent moment to capture this piece of history,” Carstensen told JTNews. “If there isn’t a concerted effort to do it now, the stories will be lost, the artifacts will be lost, and opportunities that exist with that will be lost.”
Delilah Simon, one of WSHERC’s co-executive directors, said that in addition to the continued, steady loss of Holocaust survivors, the media that hold their stories have a limited lifespan, which are quickly coming to an end.
“We have Beta tapes of testimonies from Washington State survivors,” Simon said. “They get old — they actually deteriorate — and they need to be restored. Otherwise, you totally lose the stories.”
Simon said that upgrading from videotape to digital formats would allow for wider uses of survivors’ stories in the classroom and on the Web. The grant would also allow WSHERC to increase its roster of master teachers, who take seminars in Holocaust education, and then use them in schools around the state, as well as join WSHERC’s educational advisory council.
Finally, the money would be used to create a staff position for a grant writer.
If, as is often the case in state politics, the full $255,000 request is not granted, the priority would be to preserve the deteriorating artifacts, but Simon said there is significant demand from the state’s teachers — and support from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction — to fund the budget request.
There is “much more demand than we can meet,” said Simon. “We’re [telling] legislators, ‘the need is out there. Your constituents, your teachers, your educators, want this. You recommend it. Now fund it.’”
The Federation’s Carstensen said that securing budget money may not be that easy, even with a line item as small as $250,000. Still, Seattle Senators Adam Kline (D), Ed Murray (D), Ken Jacobsen (D) and Rep. Eric Pettigrew (D-South Seattle) are backing the request.
“The political dynamics and the institutional dynamics suggest ‘let’s maintain the status quo,’” Carstensen said.
One of the urgent problems facing the state is the current housing crisis — ranging from spiraling rent to housing availability to the collapse of the subprime loan industry — meaning significant energy will be put toward poverty issues this session, Carstensen said.
“The housing issue is affecting a lot of people in the Puget Sound area, and it’s affecting them in a lot of different ways,” he said.
As reported in JTNews last month, the Puget Sound Jewish Coalition on Homelessness will be lobbying to more than double the State Housing Trust Fund to $230 million to build affordable housing as well as increase short-term and transitional housing programs.
Pending board approval, Jewish Family Service will also put significant efforts into housing issues this session. Ted Daniels, who heads the public policy committee at JFS, said housing subsidies for low-income families have not increased in more than a decade, “while the cost of living has jumped up significantly.”
“What we’re faced with is a very short session,” Daniels said. “The governor has released her budget and from what is evident in what she isn’t doing or proposing, she’s keeping the purse strings pretty tight for fear of what the income will be…for the state for the next biennium.”
JFS will also support efforts like that of the PSJCS to increase the housing trust fund.
Related to housing issues is a problem more families in the state have faced this year: putting food on the table. To provide relief for families as well as food banks like the one JFS runs, Daniels said, they will push to reduce the threshold for eligibility for food stamps for the working poor.
“What we’re trying to do is eliminate the requirement for gross income, or reduce it so that they become more eligible,” he said. “It not only takes the pressure off the food bank, it allows them to have healthier diets and work themselves out of it.”
JFS will also push for what is called the New American Initiative, which seeks $2 million to help Washington’s 135,000 legal resident aliens and refugees in obtaining citizenship — outside of the scope of public assistance.
“We don’t have the funding to enable these people to become citizens,” said Daniels. “What this does is empower them more than they are actually able to do right now.”
Lauren Simonds, executive director of the Seattle section of the National Council of Jewish Women, said in addition to supporting housing efforts, it will once again push what Simonds said goes beyond its reproductive rights agenda.
Senate Bill 6189, introduced by Sen. Karen Keiser (D-Normandy Park), would require “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.”
Failure to comply would cost a pharmacy its license to dispense medications.
Simonds said that while many people associate the refusal of pharmacists to fill prescriptions, or to fill them in a timely manner, with “Plan B” high-dose birth control, “we know in this state that pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions for syringes for people with diabetes because the pharmacist’s assistant didn’t like what the guy looked like,” while others have refused HIV/AIDS vaccines “because they think somebody must have engaged in some immoral act to get the disease.”
In November, U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton in Tacoma issued an injunction against legislation in last year’s session that would have required pharmacists to dispense Plan B after two pharmacists sued the state, citing the law was a violation of their civil rights.
Simonds said that S.B. 6189 or similar bills NCJW may support would respect pharmacists’ rights to use their professional judgment, “but would require pharmacists to fill all valid, legal prescriptions.
“Our community standard in this country is that everybody has a right to these medications,” she said.
NCJW is also working with the Washington Alliance for Reproductive Choice, a collaboration of nonprofit organizations from around the state, to fix the conflict in laws regarding funding for sex education in the state. The legislature passed a law last year that all sex education in public schools must be medically accurate, while federal funding — which the state is required to apply for — has abstinence-only education stipulations attached. The reproductive choice alliance will push to change the language to not require the state to apply for the federal funding.
NCJW will also support the Ceasefire Washington organization’s attempt to change firearm background check laws for people who are mentally ill. The current statute prohibits the mentally ill with 90-day inpatient commitments from obtaining firearms, but legislation by Rep. Patricia Lantz (D-Gig Harbor) would lower that commitment to 14 days, the earlier mandated evaluation checkpoint.
“What that legislation will do is increase the number of records that actually get into the NICS system as well as better ensure that the existing records are going into the NICS system,” said Kristen Comer, Ceasefire Washington’s executive director.
NICS, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, combines data from all 50 states to provide background checks on gun purchasers — though it only possesses information on convicted felons at this time. In addition, Simonds said, 80 percent of the mentally ill who should be in the state’s database are not.
Legislation approved by Congress in December to fund the expansion of NICS to include the mentally ill must be signed by President Bush by Jan. 16. The president will be touring the Middle East until Jan. 18.
Finally, $8 million from last year’s budget for nursing home reimbursement rates has gone unallocated, so the Federation’s Carstensen will be working to ensure that at least some of that money goes toward nonprofit nursing facilities such as the Caroline Kline Galland Home.
“There needs to be a decision on how that money gets allocated and in what proportion…it [goes] to direct care,” Carstensen said.