September 6, 2006

Coloring Freeway Park

Two points came out of last Friday’s public forum on a proposed landscape renovation plan at Freeway Park.

One is that the park’s original landscape designer, Angela Danadjieva, doesn’t think of Seattle’s urban woodland, the first of its kind built on a downtown lid over Interstate 5, as a park. She says it’s a “landscaped bridge” – one that needs new color in its understory because the Douglas firs she chose in the early ’70s have made the park dark and uninviting.

The Parks Department has already cut down 20 large trees, with more to go. In the understory, Danadjieva would plant a “Persian carpet” of magnolias and rhododendrons in the park’s plaza at Sixth Avenue and Seneca Street, dogwoods along the stairs up to First Hill, and cherry and crab apple trees along the walkway to the convention center.

One resident said the plantings would require a lot of Parks maintenance — something the city chronically underfunds. Retirees from nearby buildings said they liked the plan, but, because Danadjieva had no mic, they also kept repeating they couldn’t hear her.

A final draft of the plan, which is not yet funded, is expected in the next few weeks.

Who’s flawed?

It’s been eight years since Jessica Braam sued the state over being placed in 34 separate foster homes. But two years after the state agreed to a settlement stipulating actions it would take to fix foster care, the Department of Social and Health Services is still dragging its feet.

On June 22, the Braam Oversight Panel, an independent board created in 2004 to monitor the settlement, rejected a compliance plan that DSHS submitted to it. The plan was intended to address 32 milestones that the Braam panel already warned the department it had failed to meet between the settlement date in mid-July 2004 and the end of 2005.

The panel’s warning came in a March monitoring report, which DSHS was obligated to respond to with the compliance plan. But, in its June 22 response to the DSHS plan, the five-member panel rebuked the department for the excuses it found in place of action:

“The Panel has particular concern about the Department deciding two years after signing the Settlement that two very significant Action Steps—creating a plan to meet the Council on Accreditation’s caseload standards and providing social work visits every 30 days to children in foster care — are ‘fundamentally flawed’ and ‘overly ambitious.’ …Any item that was ‘fundamentally flawed’ should have been identifiable as such when the Settlement was reached.”

The state now has until July 21 to submit a revised plan to the panel, which has no regulatory authority. If that plan is found unsatisfactory, says Braam co-counsel Casey Trupin, he would have to take DSHS back to court on contempt.

“For anyone to say that something that’s recognized as good practice is overly ambitious is not helpful,” Trupin says. “They’re going to have to show a level of commitment that is stronger than what they’ve shown to date to keep it out of court.”

—Cydney Gillis

Show me the money

One thing we can count on when the legislature reconvenes early next year: a long line of business lobbyists ready to plead for tax breaks for their own particular industry. It’s time we started turning them down, says Marilyn Watkins.

Watkins, policy director at the Seattle-based think tank the Economic Opportunity Institute, is author of a report released last month called “Adding Up: New Tax Breaks in Washington 2004-2006.” She says the most common cry of the lobbyists — that tax breaks spur economic development— doesn’t ring true.

“When you look at all the studies nationally, there’s no compellng case that can be made to say that more tax breaks result in more jobs,” she says. “Companies are going to locate in a small range of places” with ports, highways, and a ready workforce regardless of whether or not the local government is offering a tax giveaway.

And while the benefits so far seem dubious, there is no way for legislators to discover that — since they created no method of assessing the results of even the newest tax breaks. Sixty-one new exemptions have been passed in the last three years, says the report, at a cost in lost tax revenue to the state of $474 million over the next two years alone.

A new law passed in 2006 to review the state’s tax breaks once every decade is “a good step,” says Watkins. But since tax breaks can also look like money spent on a balance sheet, the next step should come in the form of a tax expenditures report every two years, so that “the legislature has before them when they make decisions on the budget basically everywhere the government is spending its money.”

Meanwhile, Watkins predicts more such requests for tax breaks next year. “People who don’t have one can say hey, I feel like a chump if I don’t get one this year,” she says. “Every time one [industry] gets one, it gives everyone else more ammunition to call for their own.”

—Adam Hyla