Big news! Meaningful school seismic safety bills have been introduced in the Legislature

This week, we got very encour­ag­ing and hope­ful news that sug­gests momen­tum is build­ing in the Leg­is­la­ture for one of NPI’s top 2022 leg­isla­tive ses­sion priorities.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ger­ry Pol­let and Sen­a­tor David Frockt led bipar­ti­san groups of state law­mak­ers in intro­duc­ing leg­is­la­tion that would final­ly pro­vide mean­ing­ful fund­ing to upgrade many of Wash­ing­ton State’s seis­mi­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble schools.

The bills (HB 2095 and SB 5933) would cre­ate a school seis­mic safe­ty grant pro­gram, backed by gen­er­al oblig­a­tion bonds that would need to be vot­er-approved in a spe­cial statewide vote to be held this November.

As the bil­l’s intent sec­tion explains:

The leg­is­la­ture finds that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Wash­ing­ton stu­dents in pub­lic school dis­tricts and state trib­al edu­ca­tion com­pact schools attend school in old­er facil­i­ties locat­ed in geo­log­i­cal­ly active areas. Accord­ing­ly, the leg­is­la­ture intends to cre­ate a grant pro­gram to help school dis­tricts and state trib­al edu­ca­tion com­pact schools cov­er the cost of retro­fitting or relo­cat­ing school facil­i­ties locat­ed in high seis­mic areas or tsuna­mi zones.

This per­fect­ly aligns with one of our ten adopt­ed pri­or­i­ties for 2022: Pro­tect youth, teach­ers, and school staff from geo­log­ic haz­ards by pro­vid­ing state fund­ing to replace or repair seis­mi­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble build­ings.

Wash­ing­ton has wait­ed far too long to take action to address this prob­lem. As Seat­tle Times reporter San­di Doughton explained last fall, our neigh­bors Ore­gon and British Colum­bia are ahead of us in upgrad­ing school build­ings and mak­ing them super resilient so they can be used for com­mu­ni­ty dis­as­ter recovery.

This leg­is­la­tion autho­rizes the sale of gen­er­al oblig­a­tion bonds in the amount of $500 mil­lion “to finance all or a part of the cost” of school seis­mic safe­ty projects “and all costs inci­den­tal there­to.” As men­tioned, the bonds would need to be autho­rized by vot­ers in a statewide elec­tion; that’s due to the Con­sti­tu­tion’s lim­i­ta­tions on state, coun­ty, and munic­i­pal indebtedness.

Funds would be dis­trib­uted in phas­es of $100,000,000 per bien­ni­um over five bien­nia, begin­ning with the 2023–2025 bien­ni­um, accord­ing to Sec­tion 5 of the bill. Build­ings con­struct­ed before 1998 that have not received a seis­mic retro­fit to 2005 stan­dards would be eli­gi­ble for grant fund­ing is they are locat­ed in a high seis­mic haz­ard area. The leg­is­la­tion pro­vides tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tions for what con­sti­tutes a high risk area, one earth­quake-spe­cif­ic and one tsunami-specific.

Grant appli­ca­tions would be eval­u­at­ed by an advi­so­ry com­mit­tee appoint­ed by the Super­in­ten­dent of Pub­lic Instruc­tion (cur­rent­ly Chris Reyk­dal). The super­in­ten­dent would then pro­pose a list of projects to the gov­er­nor, and they would make appro­pri­a­tions requests to the Leg­is­la­ture after select­ing projects.

Impor­tant­ly, grant amounts would have to be “equal to at least two-thirds of the esti­mat­ed total project cost” (Sec­tion 2, Sub­sec­tion 5ii).

This key pro­vi­sion will ensure that school dis­tricts will get mean­ing­ful finan­cial sup­port from the state, with the state shoul­der­ing most of the cost, as opposed to a token con­tri­bu­tion that would­n’t be enough to actu­al­ly pro­ceed with new build­ings or retro­fits of exist­ing build­ings due to insuf­fi­cient local funding.

The full bill text is below, and avail­able on leg.wa.gov.

Four years ago, NPI asked the Leg­is­la­ture to appro­pri­ate funds to enable the Depart­ment of Nat­ur­al Resources to study the seis­mic risk of the state’s school build­ings. Although the Leg­is­la­ture did not pro­vide all of the fund­ing we asked for, enough was bud­get­ed to enable an ini­tial inven­to­ry to be conducted.

DNR’s Wash­ing­ton Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey com­plet­ed the work that the Leg­is­la­ture fund­ed last June and deliv­ered a very sober­ing report, which you can read below.

We took notice of the report, as did for­mer Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Buck, KING5, and The Seat­tle Times, but it did­n’t get the kind of atten­tion that it should have.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Pol­let, Sen­a­tor Frockt, and Super­in­ten­dent Reyk­dal, who all care deeply about tak­ing action to fix this prob­lem, have been try­ing to fig­ure out a path for­ward since then, and this leg­is­la­tion is what they’ve come up with. As men­tioned, it has Repub­li­can cospon­sors, which is real­ly encouraging.

The Sen­ate ver­sion will have a hear­ing this com­ing Mon­day in Ways & Means, at 4 PM. I will be speak­ing in sup­port of the bill on NPI’s behalf.

If the leg­is­la­tion is suc­cess­ful, NPI will make pas­sage of the statewide bal­lot mea­sure to autho­rize the bonds its top elec­toral pri­or­i­ty in the 2022 midterms.

We encour­age read­ers to sign in PRO on the bill; you can do that right here.