Social Services Round-Up: Contenders and Casualties
by Cydney Gillis & Adam Hyla
On the morning that a coalition of housing and homelessness groups goes to the Capitol campus, some important bills are surviving and others have bit the dust.
One of the more shocking defeats for one economic justice organization was Senate Bill 6648. The bill, which would have made banks and borrowers sit down to renegotiate home loans before foreclosure, lost in an odd turn of events during a night-owl session just hours before the scheduled cutoff.
In a voice vote before the Senate Ways and Means Committee, the bill passed. But Senators’ signatures on the bill afterward didn’t add up: nine signed the bill “do pass,” five signed “do not pass,” and four signed “without recommendation,” including Sen. Debbie Regala (D-Tacoma) — a shocking move, says Poverty Action executive director Beverly Spears, for a liberal Democrat.
Then Ed Murray (D-Seattle) and Eric Oemig (D-Kirkland) failed to sign at all — and the bill went down to defeat.
It couldn’t have died in a worse year, says Spears, citing figures by the Center for Responsible Lending of a wave of foreclosure proceedings that hasn’t yet swept by: banks initiated the process on 30,000 Washington homeowners in 2009, according to the center, and another 132,000 are coming in the next three years.
The bill’s defeat shows, she says, that “once again big banks win out and for the taxpayers, the people who are struggling, it’s just tough luck.”
The mysterious turnout is one of several disappointments that housing advocates say they have faced so far in a session where legislators are looking at how to close a budget gap of $2.6 billion — or more, depending on a new revenue forecast expected today. And prospects remain uncertain for passing new taxes to save major social programs that the governor has called for cutting or eliminating.
Banking interests managed to gut another prevention bill put forward by Rep. Tina Orwall (D-Des Moines) that would have required lenders to give laid-off homeowners on unemployment a year’s forbearance before they could foreclose on a property.
By the time it got voted out of the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Seattle Democrat Jamie Pedersen, however, there was little left in Second Substitute House Bill 2623. The bill, which is scheduled for a floor vote today, does provide $500,000 to pay for more of the federally certified housing counselors who can help people renegotiate their mortgages – currently, there are only 39 in the whole state – but the forbearance is gone, which Orwall finds disappointing.
“We would have been the first state in the nation to move on this idea,” Orwall says, but “the timing of a new approach and the stress in the banking industry made it very difficult to move forward.”
There have been victories as well. On Wednesday, in a 75-22 vote, the House passed another bill sponsored by Orwall, the Washington Works Housing Act, which directs the state’s Housing Finance Commission to issue $1 billion worth of bonds in the private market specifically to fund workforce housing projects built by nonprofits or local housing authorities.
Once the bond on an individual project is paid off, Engrossed Substitute House Bill 2753 calls for the nonprofit or housing authority to charge no more in rent than what’s required to cover the building’s operations and maintenance costs. That’s a new idea, Orwall says, aimed at creating deep affordability on the back end and construction jobs upfront.
Adding new money to the Housing Trust Fund, the state’s primary source of funding for low-income housing developers, would also create jobs, housing advocates say, but it’s proving to be a tough sell – one of the issues that about 300 constituents are expected to gather and contact legislators about today during a Housing and Homelessness Advocacy Day that started at 9 a.m. at United Churches of Olympia.
In last year’s legislative session, lawmakers cut the trust fund in half, bringing it to $100 million: money that was all allocated to projects last year, housing advocates say. To raise another $100 million for the coming fiscal year, legislation in the House and Senate would tack an existing document recording fee of $62 that’s already charged during a home’s sale onto secondary sales of the mortgage loan.
In hearings on the bills – 3177 in the House and 6817 in the Senate – banking representatives have rejected the idea, arguing, in part, that the extra fees could tank business and close the doors of some of the state’s small community lenders. Nick Federici, a lobbyist for the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, calls that a smoke screen.
“They’re holding up the community banks as a human shield,” Federici says. To charge the same large lenders that crashed the U.S. economy a $62 fee, he says, “is not going to damage the financial markets.”
Orwall is less optimistic. “I’m a little worried, actually,” she says. “I think it’s going to be a challenging conversation [and] we have a lot of advocacy to do.”
Lawmakers “still have the opportunity to fund the trust fund and find revenue so they don’t do an all-cuts budget,” says Michele Thomas, policy director for WLIHA. But, “It’s grim so far.”
Legislation that would impact the budget, including House Bill 3177, which is scheduled for a vote the Capital Budget Committee on Feb. 18, can remain active throughout the session, but most bills face a Tuesday deadline to be voted out of their house of origin.
In the meantime, housing and social services advocates plan to turn out on Saturday morning for a hearing on House Bill 3176, a tax package put forward by House Finance Chair Ross Hunter (D-Medina), and on Monday for a President’s Day rally to raise revenue.
Other bills that are still in play:
• The Security Lifeline Act. Second Substitute House Bill 2782, legislation sponsored by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle) that would reform and save General Assistance-Unemployable, a program that serves 18,000 of the state’s disabled poor, is scheduled for a floor vote today. The bill would rename GAU the Disability Lifeline and has dropped a hard 90-day deadline that Dickerson wanted to impose on the Department of Social and Health Services to determine if recipients are eligible for federal SSI disability benefits. The bill also calls for creating two homeless housing pilots based on Seattle’s 1811 Eastlake building, which does not require sobriety of its residents. A similar bill introduced by Rep. Roger Goodman (D-Kirkland) – H.B. 2900 – appears dead.
• Insurance rates and credit scoring. Substitute Senate Bill 6252, sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle), is also scheduled for a floor vote today. The bill would ban the insurance company practice of using a person’s credit history or educational level to set premium rates.
• Workforce housing – Rep. Dave Quall (D-Mount Vernon) has put forward a different idea for finding revenue without raising taxes: Substitute House Bill 2912 would designate some the state’s hotel-motel sales taxes for low-income housing after the taxes finish paying off debt on Seattle’s Qwest and Safeco stadiums. The legislation, which is lined up for a floor vote today, would provide $8.4 million a year for housing in the years 2013 through 2020.
• House Bill 3141 specifies how the Governor’s office should revise Workfirst with an eye toward jobs for those with recent work history, training for those without, and disability assistance for those with barriers to getting work. It alters the timeline for DSHS’s periodic reviews of families’ eligibility for a child care subsidy called Working Connections. It’s now waiting for a floor vote.
• Victimizing the homeless. Substitute House Bill 2497 isn’t what Rep. Scott White (D-Seattle) originally proposed, which was to add assaults on the homeless to the state’s hate crimes statue. But it does make such assaults an aggravating circumstance at sentencing. On Feb. 10, the bill has passed the House 96-0 and is now in the Senate, where it has been referred to the Human Services & Corrections Committee.
• Tenant notice. Substitute Senate Bill 5549, also introduced by Kohl-Welles, would increase the amount of time a landlord or tenant must give to terminate a tenancy from 20 days to 30 days. It is awaiting a Senate floor vote today.
More legislation that is now out of the game:
• The House Rules Committee yesterday placed HB 2484 in its ‘X’ file: the place bills go when they’re officially dead. Similar to Senate Bill 5549 above, it also would have allowed tenants to give just 20 days’ notice that they would move if the landlord had announced a rent increase.
• The Fair Tenant Screening Act, House Bill 2622, would have created a “portable” credit or background report to save prospective renters multiple fees.
• Two bills to ensure that state institutions — such as prisons and hospitals — aren’t discharging people who have nowhere to go languished in their respective committees.
• S.B. 6532 would have prevented patients with health insurance from being socked with outrageously high emergency room bills, just for getting care from a health care provider who doesn’t participate in their plan.
• S.B. 6780 to plan for the downsizing of state institutions for the developmentally disabled died in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
