Week 5, January 30-February 3

Legislative Watch List: more bills added

We started the week by adding some new bills that were filed over the last handful of days. The Watch List has been updated. New bills as of Monday morning:

• HB 1365 Improving Puget Sound water quality
• HB 1421 Adding counties to the voluntary stewardship program
• HB 1664 Ensuring rural representation on the environmental justice council
• SB 5628 Preserving water rights for farmland and economic development

And later in the week, even more bills were added. Activity is heating up as the first cutoff date approaches.

Spam coming to us through Hub contact form

Spam has been coming to Ryan and Tom via the Hub’s contact form. Some of the content is a little “unsavory” so Tom implemented a reCAPTCHA filter on Monday. We’ll see how well it works to keep that content out of our inboxes. Hopefully, the filter won’t make it more difficult for legitimate comments to be submitted to WACD.

Awards delivered

Tom attended the Palouse CD annual meeting to deliver the President’s Award plaque to Jennifer Boie. That meeting was very well attended. The district of the year plaque for the Pine Creek CD was also hand-delivered to the PCCD manager, Casey Lowder.

Traveling to the Palouse meeting, Tom stopped at the Central/Eastern Klickitat CD office in Goldendale to visit with manager Loren Meagher. Mike Tobin, the North Yakima CD manager, was also present. The conversation was constructive and helpful.

Returning from the Palouse meeting, Tom also stopped at the Asotin County Conservation District to visit with manager Meghan Stewart. After that meeting, he received an email notice from the Palouse CD that someone at their event tested positive the next day for COVID 19. Because of that, Tom did not attend the Clark CD board meeting on Thursday morning and instead hand-delivered Clark’s district of the year plaque to manager Zorah Oppenheimer in their new office in Vancouver.

Testimony

WACD prepared testimony this week on HB 1567 (conservation district elections) and HB 1720 (riparian grant program).

NACD annual meeting

Tom spent much of the week in New Orleans attending the NACD annual meeting. Previously, he had been elected as the Pacific Region Representative for a new organization of state association executive directors called ACED: Association of Conservation Executive Directors. ACED held several meetings during the NACD annual meeting to get started on developing the organization. ACED is particularly important to us in the Pacific Region because we have the most geographically-dispersed region (it includes seven time zones!) and we have some upcoming retirements in state association executive director positions.

Tom’s report on the NACD meeting was included in the February 17, 2023 edition of the Five Things to Know.

This week is catching up on things that fell off the table last week.

Legislative

While WACD had testified PRO on House Bill 1720 (riparian grant program at the Conservation Commission), Tom changed the position on Substitute House Bill 1720. SHB 1720 would create a parallel grant program within the Salmon Recovery Funding Board. Written testimony as submitted on SHB 1720 was published on the Hub.

Board meeting planning

Ryan and Tom are busy with final preparations for the February 27th meeting of the WACD Board of Directors.

WACD Board meeting

The WACD Board of Directors held a business meeting on Monday, February 27. This meeting was originally scheduled for February 20 but President Mumford chose to delay it because folks who went to the NACD Annual Meeting were still catching up on work that piled up while away. Board meeting documents are available in a Box.com folder.

Conservation district meetings

On Wednesday, Ryan attended the Jefferson County Conservation District board meeting in person. District Manager Joe Holtrop said this in an email to Ryan: “I just wanted to say thank you for coming to our meeting yesterday. Your input was very helpful, more helpful than any input I think we’ve received since, well, actually since I can’t remember when.”

On Thursday, Tom attended the Clark Conservation District board meeting in person. This is a breakfast meeting that starts at 7:15 am. They are pretty strict about getting their work done within two hours, and they kept to that by adjourning at 9:15 am.