BY PEPPER FISHER
Port Angeles – State Representative Adam Bernbaum of the 24th District was the guest speaker at Wednesday’s Port Angeles Chamber luncheon, presenting his take on how this year’s legislative session went in Olympia.
“So, all right, this was a bad year in Olympia. And if didn’t hear, it was tough for a variety of reasons. Federal instability was a big chunk of that. I’m a vice chair of the Transportation Committee, so I had a little bit of a hand in writing that budget. Remember, there was a week where the first three days, every day we had like a more than a hundred million dollar hit to that budget. It’s challenging to balance a budget when money is moving around very quickly. You don’t have a ton of time to produce a product, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. So, that genuinely made a lot of the work of budget writing in Olympia very difficult.”
Rep. Bernbaum circled back several times to a common theme he and other legislators struggled with. That is, being forced to choose between making budget cuts that often hit hardest those at the bottom of the economic scale, or voting in favor of a new or higher tax.
“These are decisions that we’re making because we’re trying to balance the budget without unduly raising revenue on the backs of the taxpayers. And that means making a lot of very hard choices. And I’m trying to mention this also to say, it’s very easy to go and say, “I oppose all taxes.” Politically, it never feels good to say, “I voted for a tax on you, or on this community.” Taxes, I mean, they cost businesses. They make us less competitive. They hurt families with fixed incomes. The consequence, the very real human, consequence of the revenue that we do not collect from taxes, is born primarily from the neediest people in Washington State.”
Rep. Bernbaum spent the bulk of the hour taking questions. Since he is on the House Transportation Committee, we asked him what folks in the 24th District can expect from this year’s final transportation budget.
He said it was not a good year for transportation. Wear and tear on our roads is the same every year, but the amount of gas people are buying is steadily declining because there are more and more electric vehicles. Because our state depends on gas taxes to fund our transportation projects, legislators have been working on a solution that doesn’t raise the gas tax or registration fees.
“We had a bill this year called the Road Usage Charge, and the premise of the bill, basically, you are going to be reporting how much you drive. And we’re going to be taxing hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles on the basis of how much they drive rather than continuing to increase the registration fees to those vehicles. So this was profoundly unpopular. More people signed in “con” on this bill that any bill and Washington state history. There were, like, 20,000 people said they hate this. This was like Big Brother in my odometer. And so, the package of revenue that we raised. We still have 8 billion dollars, but half with revenue, and half with cuts.”
In the end, the legislature approved a 6-cent per-gallon increase in the gas tax, which goes into effect on July 1, and registration fees increased for electric and hybrid vehicles.
Photo: Bernbaum (left) meets with community leaders.