Seattle Forward

The Power of Books

The following article was sent out in my City View Newsletter, which you can sign up to receive here.

Wednesday I traveled to Emerson Elementary in the Rainier Beach neighborhood because they have partnered with Page Ahead to provide free book fairs to kindergartners, 1st and 2nd graders. Excited students got to browse a collection of picture and chapter books and choose their 12 favorites to take home at the end of the school year. It was a lot of fun.

Students participate in this program for three consecutive years, ensuring three full summers of reading.

It is a great program because it is so simple: summer reading prevents summer learning loss. Kids will read when they have easy access to books they’re interested in. But too many low-income households don’t have this access. A recent report from Stanford found that, by age 2, children from low-income families are six months behind kids in higher-income families when it comes to vocabulary knowledge.

Our Tax System: The Worst in the Country

The special session of the Washington State legislature will end today with no resolution to our state’s budget dilemma. Yet another special 30-day session will begin immediately.

What a mess.

The facts about the need for a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of our tax structure are very clear and persuasive.  Yet our Republican and Democratic legislators live in opposing realities about the current state budget; no conclusion to this impasse is in sight. Further, the solutions being offered dance around the core issue: an unjust and increasingly inadequate tax system, from top to bottom.

Local economist Dick Conway appeared before my City Council committee last week and presented a report with sobering findings: Washington’s tax system is the worst in the country. He grades the state an F in the categories of fairness (ranked 51^st out of 51 states and DC), adequacy (50^th), stability (47^th), and transparency (50^th).

State-by-State Preschool Rankings

The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) released its 2014 State of Preschool report this week. It rates states on preschool access, public funding, and quality measures. Washington’s report card is here. Our state ranks 33^rd in access for 4-year-olds and 8^th in terms of state spending. We also met 9 out of 10 quality standards.

This Associated Press article details current efforts led by State Rep. Ruth Kagi to expand access to quality preschool around the state.

The report also gives a shout out to Seattle for moving forward with its own preschool program in its recommendations section: “When states do not adequately support high-quality pre-K, communities should act on their own as cities across the nation from New York to Seattle have already done.”

NIEER’s director, Dr. Steven Barnett, has presented to the City Council before and is a member of the team selected to evaluate the Seattle Preschool Program.

Media Coverage on Arena

There was media coverage over the weekend about the proposed SODO arena and I want to provide some context for my comments.

The City, King County and the Hansen group have a legally binding agreement related to the SODO arena. That agreement includes a list of prerequisites that must be met before the public financing dollars become available. The original MOU remains in place and its terms are actionable if the prerequisites are met.

One of those prerequisites is the awarding of an NBA franchise to Seattle. (Section 24-d, page 34 of MOU) Everything we have read and heard indicates that this is not likely in the near future, so people have asked about alternative paths.

Some have asked whether the City would change the agreement to allow the Arena to proceed upon the award of an NHL team to Seattle. Shifting the agreement to accommodate an NHL team would be a material change in the terms of the agreement and, in my opinion, would require a substantial reduction or elimination of public financing. Such a change would also require County Council approval.

The original agreement was written to require the presence of an NBA team because not having an NBA team increased the financial risk to the City and County.