The Snoqualmie Valley Chamber of Commerce held the first of two candidate forums for the upcoming general election on Sept. 21 at the Snoqualmie TPC Golf Course.
Invited to speak were incumbent Legislative District 5 Sen. Mark Mullet (D-Issaquah) and his challenger, Rep. Chad Magendanz (R-Issaquah), and the candidates running for District 5 state representative Position 2, Darcy Burner (D-Carnation) and Paul Graves (R-Fall City).
Carolyn Simpson, vice president of the chamber, moderated the forum and asked the four candidates a series of 14 questions about the issues important to the 5th District; the two main topics were education funding and transportation infrastructure and services.
Education funding in the face of the McCleary decision was a focal point for questions to the candidates. McCleary was a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that the state did not live up to its constitutional requirement to fund K-12 education. The court gave the Legislature until 2018 to show significant progress on fully funding education in the state.
Simpson asked the candidates: What does to “fully fund education” mean to you? What is your plan to comply with the Supreme Court decision and how would it affect taxpayers in Snoqualmie Valley?
Magendanz: “My vision for a fully-funded education program is one that has both parties involved. It’s not one party jamming through its agenda … The bipartisan group we have working at the core, the education funding task force, which I served on this morning, we are in the thick of this and we have built relationships together, we have found the common ground here. We know how to eliminate our dependency on local levies, and we are getting the final numbers so we can establish how we are going to provide the revenue. We can do this if we work in a bipartisan fashion.”
Mullet: “Your local levy let’s say is $2.50 per $1,000. Chad’s idea is you lower that to $1.50, and raise the state rate by $1, so then the state is paying more and the locals are paying less. The beauty of local levies is that money has to stay in your school. The second you make that local levy a state levy it will get redistributed to the other side of the mountains, I can 100 percent guarantee it. Right now unlike traffic, which sucks, the schools are amazing.
“Our number one priority going into this session is we are not going to let the people in the other parts of the state solve their school problems by stealing our local levy dollars … You can make local levies permanent. You can have simple majority for school construction bonds. Those two things get a long ways towards solving the problem.”
Burner: “The base per student rate that Snoqualmie Valley School District got from the state is roughly $2,000 per student per year less than the other neighboring districts. It leads to real problems with having adequate funding … I agree we need a bipartisan group to sit down and actually solve the problem. We need to fully fund our schools. We should start by looking at tax loopholes, how much the revenue will increase because the economy is recovering. I agree with Mark that the idea of taking local levy dollars that we have voted on, having the state take them and redistribute them does not solve the problem.”
Graves: “In the decade up to 2012, when new dollars came into the state’s budget above and beyond the year before, the state took about a third of them and dedicated it to K-12 education and put about two-thirds to everything else. I’ve been proud of the senate Republicans in the past four years. In those four years, they have flipped that ratio. When new dollars come in, two-thirds go to K-12 education and a third goes to everything else. Just by flipping that ratio, we’ve been able to add $4.8 billion to K-12 education in a $33 billion a year budget. That’s the highest increase in state history.”
“By continuing the ratio we can go a long way toward fully funding our schools.”
The other major topic of the night was transportation, specifically the Snoqualmie Parkway interchange with I-90 and the transportation package passed to increase gas taxes by 11.7 cents. Simpson asked how Mullet and Magendanz voted on the 2015 package (yes and no) and asked Burner and Graves how they would have voted (yes and yes). Candidates were also asked how they would address Snoqualmie’s interchange issue.
Graves: “I would have supported the transportation package. No transportation package is ever going to be perfect, but for a growing region like ours we need to make sure we have investments especially in things like the interchange, widen the Maple Valley Highway to four lanes the entire way.”
“What we also need is a strong voice for east King County commuters. I live in Fall City and work in downtown Seattle, I take a bus every day. I’m not opposed to transit, but I do think we here in east King County have been shortchanged. We don’t have a strong enough voice for those who live here and drive cars and will continue to drive cars. We are going to have a transportation revolution over the next 30 years. Everything is going to be on demand and it’s going to be flexible and individualized and I think we owe it to ourselves and the next generation, as well, to plan for that revolution to come.”
Burner: “I would have voted for the transportation package. It’s incredibly important that we make the shared investments in the infrastructure that makes it possible for this region to function. The 18 and 90 interchange, we need to push to have fixes to that sooner rather than later.”
“We don’t have enough public transit options in east King County. Giving people more options in terms of how they can get around and how they get to and from work and other places they need to go is important,” Burner added, in reference to Sound Transit 3, the proposal to bring light rail to the Puget Sound area and as far east as Issaquah.
Mullet: “We have monthly meetings with WSDOT about what can we do in the 2017 session to provide immediate relief. The first one is you harden the shoulder on 18 for the first mile so that people coming off I-90 they can get off. We talked about putting an extra lane on the exit as you are coming from North Bend so you can get off without having to wait behind all those people trying to get on 18 going the other way.
“I think the Sound Transit (proposal) is an interesting one. Everyone in Snoqualmie kind of gets a free ride. You are outside the Sound Transit taxing district as is Maple Valley, as is two-thirds of our district and if you want better transit in Snoqualmie, I will give you the vision of how you get it. You have light rail in Issaquah and you have a bus on a perpetual circle every 15 minutes between Snoqualmie and that light rail station. You will never in a million years get that perpetual circle all the way to Seattle. You can get it if Issaquah has light rail and you know who’s going to pay for it? People who live in Ballard. When people say they don’t want ST3 they really aren’t battling for the residents of Snoqualmie.”
Magendanz: “This had an emergency clause in it so it could not be overwritten by the voters. $16.1 billion is the biggest tax increase in state history. I think the voters should get a chance to weigh in on this. I think that’s a responsibility of legislators and most of our caucus supported that measure to strike the emergency clause. There was a provision for Sound Transit to get half of the 50-cent levy authority allocated for junior tax districts. All of our parks, flood control districts, fire, EMS, libraries, metro, all these things come out of that 50 cents and that money is spoken for and they get half of it as the highest priority, so if they get this Sound Transit property tax, it’s going to displace half the folks who are paying into the current levy system and that’s just wrong.”
