Daily Score Blog

Oregon's only coal plant has been in the news lately - both for a showdown brewing over its fate and for the pollution that may be left behind. Here's a quick roundup of issues at Portland General Electric's coal plant in Boardman, Oregon:

Ted Sickinger at the Oregonian (who's been following the twists and turns of this story) reports that state regulators and the utility have been at a stalemate over how and when to close the coal plant, which will need significant upgrades in the next decade to meet pollution standards. Today, PGE made another offer. Here's where different players stand:

• Oregon environmental regulators want the utility to stop burning coal there by 2018 or 2020, which would be decades earlier than PGE originally expected to close the plant. But they also want the utility to spend up to $320 million to reduce air pollution in the meantime. 
  
• PGE is threatening to keep the plant running until 2040 if the state requires the utility to make such a large investment. Now, the utility has proposed another alternative: close the plant in 2020 and spend only $75 million on new pollution controls (plus additional operating costs.)
• Other groups, such as the Sierra Club, are pushing for a shutdown by 2015.

As we've written before, the state of Oregon is taking a gamble. It's not in the state's interest to have the coal plant operate until 2040. From an environmental perspective, it doesn't make sense to keep burning such a highly polluting fuel when there are much cleaner alternatives. And it would be an unwise investment--one that could hurt Oregon's ratepayers--to sink  millions of dollars into a coal plant that would become uneconomical if future climate policies force polluters to pay for the right to release carbon. But the state has been pretty unequivocal that the utility must reduce air pollution in the meantime that causes smog, exacerbates pollution and damages developing brains. So it's a question of balancing all those goals.

And speaking of pollution, it's not just what comes out of the stack that's problematic.

When readers ask for charts, I can't refuse! So, as an accompaniment to my previous analysis of income taxes in Washington's "neighbor" states, here's a more thorough examination.

I've calculated the tax burden -- for both single and joint filers -- under Initiative 1098 in Washington along with the state's four nearest neighbors. I used annual income in half million dollar increments up to $2 million. Have a look.

Sightline has developed a new pair of maps -- here and here -- that illustrate quite nicely the fairness of tax systems in the 50 states. 

In the map below, states are color coded according to the tax burden shouldered by the state's poorest families. The reason Washington is bright red -- the brightest red of any state -- is that the poorest 20 percent of Washington's families pay 17.3 percent of their income in state taxes. It's by far the highest amount in the nation.

See the animated data-rich version: The Poorest Families: How much do they pay in state taxes?

Last week the Olympian, the newspaper of Washington’s capitol city Olympia published a deeply flawed editorial encouraging voters to reject Referendum 52. Their reason seemed almost completely based on the idea that it is too complicated and would add too much debt to the state’s existing load. Contrary to Aug. 26th’s editorial, there isn’t anything complicated in the vote for Referendum 52. It’s a chance to invest in schools, jobs, and our future. And we’ve pointed out more than once that the increase in the state’s debt limit is tiny and wouldn’t affect the state’s credit rating.

What Referendum 52 does do is dedicate $500 million in funds over the next several years for upgrades to local schools. These improvements would reduce the back-log of maintenance in cash-strapped school districts and cut down on energy spending—creating savings that would stay in our classrooms. 

The Puget Sound Partnership -- the agency leading the charge to recover the Sound -- has been getting a lot of public scrutiny of late. A critical four-day investigation by KUOW’s John Ryan. A scolding editorial in the Tacoma News Tribune. An unfavorable audit by the state in May. A second look at missteps in financial oversight from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office.

None of it has unearthed a smoking-gun of corruption or gross professional ineptitude. But they all indicate that the Partnership needs to shore up its operations. There’s been sloppiness in awarding contracts that hint at political favors. A situation with a whistleblower went south. It’s not been pretty.

But what may matter even more than these transgressions themselves (the Partnership’s Executive Director David Dicks vows the group has tightened up its financial dealings), is the challenge they create when it comes to the agency’s core mission: Saving Puget Sound.

The Partnership cannot, in less than a decade, return the Sound to health unless it has widespread and enthusiastic buy in from residents, businesses, and the nonprofit community. Without that, the agency is sunk. And all of these recent hits to its reputation and public trust have left the group taking on water.

Here's what needs to happen:

Minority rule sounds bad enough in theory: undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unfair. But in practice, its ramifications become even worse.

If Washington voters approve BP-funded and Tim Eyman-sponsored I-1053 in November, just 17 members of the Washington Senate will hold veto power over closing tax loopholes and raising revenue.

Who are those 17?

In principle, it could be any 17 senators, but in reality, it would be the 17 most conservative members—the minority most opposed to closing loopholes and raising revenue. (For political junkies, I include a list at the end of the post.)

That’s a group far to the right of the state’s political center of gravity. Judging from their voting records, they are twice as conservative as the typical member of the state senate. All white, mostly male, and mostly from outlying places like Ritzville and Moses Lake, they are also mostly Republican. My argument here is not partisan, however: They are not all Republicans, and not all Republicans are among them.

The 17’s philosophy is as legitimate a part of public discourse as anyone’s, but no one should think that they are simply a few degrees right of center on the state’s political continuum. They are a distinct ideological minority, polarized away from the governing coalition in Olympia.

(Larger version of chart here.)

I rode the Seattle streetcar today with my nearly two-year-old daughter. It was her first "school" field trip, and her classmates had been excited about it for weeks. There were lively debates in the Rainforest Room about whether the streetcar would be purple or orange. Edie, who wore her lavender shirt for "trolley day," picked wrong but didn't mind.

Her daycare class had prepared for the round-trip ride from South Lake Union to Westlake by learning about different kinds of transportation: making trains out of chairs, creating pictures with car wheels dipped in paint, watching seaplanes land in Lake Union, scooping up pebbles with bulldozers, reading books like Donald Crews' "Freight Train." But if my kid is any judge, it doesn't take much to get them excited about mass transit.

"Bus" was one of her first words. She startles strangers on the street by yelling it at the top of her lungs whenever she sees one. Yet she hasn't actually ridden on one yet. And as I saw how fascinated she was by the streetcar—looking at its reflection in buildings, watching the floor joints move, trying to lick the windows, I found myself asking why I hadn't done this before.

But, if all commutes can kill, at least I’ll go down with the wind in my hair, a smile on my face, and feeling fit and energized (and smug, apparently). The point is, I get to ride my bike to work mostly because I have a relatively short commute. Many aren’t so lucky. And as new research shows, long commutes—car crashes and other accidents aside—take their toll in other more insidious ways—killing us slowly or at least causing some misery and suffering while we’re alive.

In fact, American workers with lengthy commutes are more likely to report a range of adverse physical and emotional conditions, leading to lower overall scores on Gallup-Healthway’s “well-being index.” Whether it’s time away from family and friends, sitting uncomfortably in a confined space, loss of exercise and recreation time, or bouts of road rage, long commutes take their toll.

Washington's Initiative 1098 has sparked debate about the impact of income taxes on small business. (See opinion pieces here, here, and here, for example.) There seems to be some confusion—as well as some claims on the outer edge of truthfulness—so I've put together a triplet of charts that may help clarify things.

First up, here's a look at how business owners would fare under 1098:

The data used in this chart come from research by the Economic Opportunity Institute.

What the numbers show is that only one-tenth of all "Washington tax filers claiming net business income from a sole proprietorship, S-corporation and/or partnership" report more than $200,000 in income, the threshold for I-1098's tax on single filers.

In fact, these numbers actually overstate the reach of the tax in at least two ways. First, there are actually more business owners than shown (those with losses) who are exempt from the tax, thereby shrinking the real percentage of total business owners who are subject to it. Second, and more importantly, a significant share of the business owners are actually joint filers, which means that they would be exempt from the tax provided that their annual household incomes are below $400,000. As a result, it's fair to say that fewer—probably much fewer—than one-tenth of all business owners would pay any state income tax at all under 1098.

Next, let's look at how many businesses would get tax cuts. This one's a two-parter.