No meeting Thursday

Hey folks: I'm going to cancel Thursday's meeting, so our next downtown meeting will be Thursday Dec 4 and then Thursday Jan 8.

For anybody on or near the UW campus, I'll be talking carbon taxes (and performing some comedy) for the UW Earth Club on Thursday Nov 6, 4:30-5:30pm in Mary Gates Hall Room 258.

Upcoming meetings

Hey folks: Just a heads-up about three upcoming meetings:

Tuesday Oct 28 (tomorrow), 12-1pm in UW's Suzzallo Library, room 334, to discuss next steps, especially regarding outreach on campus. (Thanks to Jason for arranging the room.)

Wednesday Oct 29, 7:30pm in the Greenlake neighborhood, to discuss the website. (Email me for details.)

Thursday Nov 6, downtown, to discuss next steps and policy details. Please email me if you're planning to come to this meeting because there's a request to change the time from 12-1 to 12:30-1:30.

PS. Sorry for the late notice about these meetings and for the general lack of activity in the last week or two; I'm working on it!

Notes from Thursday Oct 9 meeting

In brief

• The campaign's draft website continues to improve. Comments are welcome!
• The test-run initiative we filed has generated lots of food for thought. If you still have comments don't hesitate to toss them in the mix...
• The Western Climate Initiative (WCI) continues to falter. Without wishing it ill, we should be prepared to capitalize on the resulting vacuum.
• Katherine Bragdon came to our last meeting and gave us the low-down on signature-gathering campaigns. Her advice in a nutshell is to either (1) find $700,000 to pay signature gatherers, or (2) mobilize an army of volunteers and find $700,000 to pay for the office and staff necessary to coordinate that army.
• Next downtown meeting: Th Nov 6, 12-1pm, 1402 3rd Ave, 5th floor conference room. Tentative agenda focus on policy details, e.g., Bruce's work on low-income payments.
  
• UW meetings: Tentatively T 12-1pm starting Oct 28. Email Yoram if you want more details.
  

In length

• In attendance (as private citizens unless noted otherwise): Catherine, Bruce, Katherine Bragdon, Yoram.
  
• The campaign's draft website received a major facelift thanks to the generosity of Outward Focus Design and the ongoing efforts of Catherine and Christy et al. Comments are welcome!
• The test-run initiative we filed has generated lots of food for thought. The most important part of the ballot title is the Concise Description, which is what would appear on the ballot: "This measure would repeal the state property tax supporting public schools and impose a new fee on fossil fuels, directing the fee revenue to education, low-income people, alternative-energy research, and business tax reductions." If you have thoughts about possible revisions that stay within the 33-word limit----note that hyphenated words count as one----then please post or email them. (Keep in mind that in order to make changes if and when we resubmit this measure we'd either need to change the underlying text of the initiative or file a lawsuit in Thurston County Superior Court :) Less important is the ballot measure summary, but one comment that came out of the meeting was that "education" deserved pride-of-place in the last sentence and not "alternative energy research".
• The Western Climate Initiative (WCI) continues to falter. Rumor has it that it's going to be hard to get legislative approval in all states and that OR is going to be a particularly tough sell unless there are major loopholes for forestry offsets. In Washington, rumor has it that WCI is dead if Rossi is elected and dead if Gregoire is re-elected unless she puts serious political capital into it, and even then it has only a 50-50 shot and will probably features lots of grandfathering and not much auctioning. (Next step is draft legislation from the Dept of Ecology, due out in early December.) At the federal level it is also clear (at least in my crystal ball :) that climate change is falling way down the list of priorities. All together this means that come springtime we are likely to have a lot of frustrated enviros looking for action, and we should be ready to capitalize on that.
• Next downtown meeting: Th Nov 6, 12-1pm, 1402 3rd Ave, 5th floor conference room. Tentative agenda focus on policy details, e.g., Bruce's work on low-income payments. It would also be great to talk about the tax rate and other parts of the nitty-gritty.
• UW meetings: Tentatively T 12-1pm starting Oct 28 with a tentative agenda focus on outreach efforts to other schools and groups. Email Yoram if you want more details.

Katherine Bragdon
Signature-gathering guru Katherine Bragdon came to our last meeting and gave us the low-down on signature-gathering campaigns. Nuggets from her talk:

1. It takes about 310,000 total signatures to get the 225,000 valid signatures you need to get on the ballot now, and this number will go up after the November election.
2. Paying for signatures costs about $2 per signature, or about $700,000 total.
3. You can expect to pay about the same for staff and office &etc to run an all-volunteer signature-gathering effort, and the ones that she's done lately have only had the umph for 50% volunteer signature-gathering; the good news is that having a volunteer effort gives you assets that are useful in the general election campaign.
4. She's done all-volunteer efforts in the past on animal rights issues, but animal rights advocates are crazy passionate and committed; the only other campaign that did a massive all-volunteer effort was the repeal-the-gas-tax referendum (I-912) in 2005 that gathered 420,000 signatures in just 30 days.
5. Polling the ballot language is crucial, and that costs about $20,000; you want to start with support of around 65% since it only goes down once advertising starts.
6. She's tried to enlist students to help with signature gathering but found them to be lacking in follow-through.
7. The top 250 people in each campaign she's done were responsible for about 75% of the total signatuers; the rest were mostly folks who gathered from friends-and-family rather than at public events.
8. The internet is great for communicating with loyal supporters but is hard for recruiting new volunteers and it doesn't replace phone calls or letters as ways of organizing and reaching out to supporters. (I'm not sure I agree with her on this one, but then again she's the expert.)
   
9. If we could gather pledges for 500,000 signatures she would be impressed but still not at all confident that they'd follow through, and consequently not at all confident that we'd make the ballot.
10. Organizing beforehand is crucial, and it would be a huge help to have organizations on board to contribute time/staff/money/mailing lists/etc.
    
11. All of her campaigns have been Initiatives to the People, which gather signatures between about Feb 1 and June 30; she hasn't done an Initiative to the Legislature, which gathers signatures between about April 1 and Dec 30, but strongly recommends setting a target date for completing of October, before the weather turns bad, because you don't want to have to struggle through bad weather in December to meet your target.

Great work everyone!

Ballot language and meeting Thursday noon!

Hello all: We're meeting this Thursday 12-1pm in the 5th floor conference room of the Joseph Vance Building, 1402 3rd Ave (at Union). Initiative guru Katherine Bragdon will be coming to talk about volunteer signature gathering efforts for ballot measures.

And, speaking of ballot measures, here's our ballot title and ballot summary from the secretary of state:

Ballot title [This is what would appear on the ballot]

Statement of subject: Initiative Measure No. 417 concerns taxes and fees.

Concise description: This measure would repeal the state property tax supporting public schools and impose a new fee on fossil fuels, directing the fee revenue to education, low-income people, alternative-energy research, and business tax reductions.

Should this measure be enacted into law? Yes [ ] No [ ]

Ballot measure summary [This would appear in the voters pamphlet and elsewhere, but I don't think it would appear directly on the ballot.]

This measure would repeal the state property tax for the support of the common schools and reduce certain taxes on businesses. It would also impose a new fee on the extracting, processing, refining, or importing of fossil fuels, including natural gas, petroleum, or coal. Revenue raised by the fee would be used for alternative energy research at universities and colleges, common school education, payments for low-income people, and reductions to the business and occupation tax.

Food for thought, and please post your comments online or via email or bring your thoughts on Thursday! You can see more (including Tim Eyman's I-419, also a property tax measure :) on the Secretary of State's website.

New draft and meeting change to Thursdays?

Hello all:

1) Here's the bill language that I've submitted to the Secretary of State! We should get a ballot title &etc by Oct 7. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, and note that we still have a bunch of work to do; in particular, Bruce has volunteered to work on the low-income definition, so anybody who wants to get in the loop on that should holler!

2) I'd like to propose that we change our next two meetings (and maybe all future meetings) from Tuesday to Thursday, so please comment on the blog or email me if that works or doesn't work for you. The reason for changing the Tu Oct 7 meeting to Th Oct 9 is that signature-gathering guru Katherine Bragdon can't make the 7th but can make the 9th. The reason for changing the Tu Nov 4 meeting to Th Nov 6 is that on the 6th we'll know more about the direction of state government &etc. And if we're going to change the next two meetings, maybe we should just change all of them to Thursdays, so please comment on the blog or email me to let me know (both for Oct and Nov in particular and for all future meetings in general) if that works or doesn't work for you.

3) Folks in the U-District who are interested in meeting periodically (weekly? biweekly?) should email me to get in the loop. We're just starting to explore dates and times &etc.

4) Agenda items for our next meeting (tentatively Th Oct 9 12-1pm downtown):
* Quick updates on legislative news, ballot measure news, internal stuff, speaking engagements &etc.
* Katherine Bragdon talking and taking Q&A about signature gathering campaigns.

Cheers!
yoram

Initiative draft from Code Reviser's Office!

Here's the draft the Code Reviser's office came up with based on the language I sent them and a few email exchanges. Some comments:

• I'm working on getting a .doc version of this.
• We now get to review this draft and make comments or revisions, and we have to do this before our next meeting on Oct 7! We must file a final version by October 2, at which point it goes to the Secretary of State to get a ballot title, summary, number, etc.
• Remember that this is just a test run, so we don't have to set everything in stone right now. Having said that, it would be good to take advantage of this opportunity to revise the text, so here are some questions I have... please add your own in the comments section or via email!
  
• Question #1 is about the definition in section 10(3): "Low income means household income that is at or below one hundred twenty-five percent of the federally established poverty level." This language came from an unrelated piece of state legislation, and I don't know whether or not it's appropriate for our purposes.
  
• Questions #2 and #3 are in a similar vein: Question #2 is about the part of section 4(1) that property owners are not eligible for the low-income sales tax credit: Is this a good idea or not? Question #3 is whether it's worth looking into a declining-credit structure so that there's not a precipitous drop-off, e.g., with someone receiving the full credit if their income is $x and receiving zero credit if their income is one dollar more than that?
• Question #4 is about section 10(1), which says that we're using metric tons instead of short tons. The difference isn't all that much (1 metric ton is about 1.1 short tons, so a $50 tax per metric ton is a bit less than $50 per short ton) but it's worth pondering for the sake of completeness :)
• FYI, the Code Reviser's Office gave me some push-back about calling this a "fee" instead of a "tax", but eventually they agreed. (They argued that a fee is something paid for a service, like a drivers license, and they went along with the argument that this is a fee for polluting the air.)
  

Notes from Sept 2 meeting

In brief

• Unless someone has last-minute corrections or wants to volunteer to file a "test" ballot measure (don't be shy :), Yoram will file a test ballot measure containing the language here.
  
• Yoram will email State Senator Eric Oemig, who asked us for ideas to look at, with a list. Details below, but the five ideas we decided on were (1) a clean energy competitive grants program, (2) sales tax credits for low-income households; (3) energy-efficiency program tied to county-level property tax credits; (4) efforts relating to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and (5) administrative costs of these and of imposing a global warming pollution fee.
• Next meeting downtown 12-1pm on Tuesday Oct 7. Will also investigate meeting with students at UW once the school year starts in late September.

In length

• In attendance (as private citizens unless noted): Christy, Catherine, Yoram.
• WCI update: Rumor still has it to expect fireworks when the WCI releases their proposal Sept 22. Permit allocations should be especially contentious.
• Website update: Catherine continues to update the website. The email sign-up form is now functional, so anyone who wants to test it is encouraged to do so. (It would be good to test it in different browsers.)
• We agreed to send Sen Oemig the following list of exploratory ideas: (1) a competitive grants program to fund clean energy R&D programs; (2) use of funds to make direct cash payments to low-income households, preferably in the form of a sales tax credit; (3) use of funds for county-level programs that provide local property tax credits for energy efficiency investments; (4) options for adding funding and/or programs to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; and (5) estimates of administration costs for the global warming fee and for the ideas listed above.
• Unless anyone hollers in the next day or two, Yoram will file a "test" ballot measure containing the language here, which is modified in fairly minor ways from the pre-meeting version. (Perhaps the biggest change is from "carbon tax" to "global warming pollution fee" :)
  
• Next meetings on the first Tuesdays of the month (e.g., Oct 7, Nov 4, Dec 2) 12-1pm downtown. Will also look into involving UW students when school starts up again.