WA ballot initiative would cut $848.6M of environmental programs

As an example of a cap-and-invest boondoggle, Heywood cited a $4 million appropriation to the Washington Department of Ecology and Whatcom County to deal with flooding in the Nooksack River basin. He said the $4 million merely creates a bureaucracy without actually installing any dikes or other flood-control measures.

A massive 2021 Nooksack River flood displaced 14,000 Canadians and 500 Whatcom County residents from their homes, prompting a 2022 agreement between British Columbia and Washington to prevent future floods. The 2024-2025 cap-and-invest budget allocated $2 million to Whatcom County for flood control planning and technical studies, $900,000 for coordinating with British Columbia, $738,000 for Whatcom County government staff to work on flood prevention, $364,000 for the Washington Ecology Department and other local governments to work on flood planning.

“Given the devastating impacts of the 2021 flood and that climate change will bring increased flood risk to the basin, this is important work that brings together groups on both sides of the border to collectively develop durable solutions that will reduce flood risk, increase community resilience, and restore habitat,” Washington Office of Financial Management spokesman Hayden Mackley wrote in an email.

Gary Stoyka, natural resources program director of the Whatcom County Public Works Department, said in an email that the county’s portion of the $4 million “supports a process that will lead to the construction of infrastructure and other features to address this problem. We cannot build much of anything, particularly involving entities outside of the U.S., without a plan and buy-in from the affected communities.“

Heywood also noted that former state senator Reuven Carlyle, architect of the cap-and-invest legislation, founded Earth Finance, a consulting firm for corporations seeking to cut carbon footprints while remaining profitable. He sees this as Carlyle profiting off the cap-and-invest program.

Carlyle said Earth Finance has not done any business with any project receiving cap-and-invest money. 

“Brian Heywood’s 100-percent-false accusation about me personally is a reflection of the deceptive and misleading Initiative 2117 that will do absolutely nothing to reduce gas prices, but is 100 percent certain to increase pollution and eviscerate transportation funding statewide,” Carlyle said.

He said cap-and-invest was designed to create clean-energy jobs, invest in ferries, provide free public transit for youth, support sustainable aviation fuel, improve wildlife protection, boost salmon recovery and other projects.

In broad strokes, the $1.08 billion in cap-and-invest dollars the Legislature allocated for 2024-2025 includes money for electric vehicle chargers, electric fire engines, buses and other government vehicles. The money will be used to pay to preserve forest lands, build trails, and make public schools and universities more energy-efficient. It will buy solar panels to generate electricity in public and private buildings. And it will pay for a Kitsap Transit hydrofoil ferry. and fund salmon recovery efforts.

The Legislature also set aside $184 million in cap-and-invest revenue for the upcoming 2025-27 biennium to build two hybrid electric/diesel ferries to get them running by 2028.

Much of the money collected is to be distributed in grants to local governments, tribes, ports and other organizations.

Fusion power

About $256,000 of Climate Commitment Act money has been appropriated to develop a fusion reactor industry through 2024’s House Bill 1924, which sets up a public/private partnership that is supposed to report back to the Legislature this December on how to boost and regulate fusion energy in Washington.