Washington state lawmakers should save solar for another day
Washington state’s second special legislative session was made necessary by lawmakers’ earlier failure to pass a budget that remedied the state’s chronic shortfall in education funding.
But some lawmakers have conflated that objective with another legislative goal: transforming the state’s approach to residential solar power. Under the guise of budgetary necessity, a bill that departs significantly from the session’s stated purpose once again is winding its way through the legislative process.
Sponsored by state Rep. Jeff Morris, D-Mount Vernon, H.B. 1912 would change the state’s solar incentive structure; transfer regulatory authority for third-party leased systems to the state Utilities and Transportation Commission; and introduce ill-conceived so-called consumer-protection mechanisms. The measure currently is being considered in the special session because it’s been deemed “necessary to implement the budget,” a designation shortened in local legislative jargon to “NTIB.”
Special sessions are, by their very nature, short and focused. While a typical session in Olympia is 105 days long, the second special session called by Gov. Jay Inslee at the end of May, is a mere 30 days. It will conclude at the beginning of July. That’s a problem since, structurally, the need for brevity precludes the opportunity for extensive deliberation.
While H.B. 1912 certainly will have some impact on the budget, it also makes changes completely unrelated to the budget. For instance, it empowers new regulators and creates dubiously named consumer-protection mechanisms. The fiscal impact of this unnecessary additional government regulation has not been vetted. It appears it will cost the state thousands of dollars per year that should be allocated instead to the state’s underfunded school system. Placing the bill’s merits aside, the NTIB label is mostly a function of political expedience, particularly when weighed against the cost of forgoing meaningful debate about its substance.
The bill and its earlier iterations, several of them also introduced by Rep. Morris, have been anything but consensus-driven. Stakeholders have debated the merits of reforming Washington’s solar energy incentive system and regulatory structure since the regular legislative session kicked off in January. Ultimately, no compromise could be reached by the time that session came to an end. Ironically, many solar advocates are against the bill and argue it hurts the industry more than it helps.
In an ideal world, parties would regroup during this interim to negotiate a mutually agreeable outcome. At the very least, they would marshal the political will necessary to effect a change of some kind.
Instead, by reintroducing the solar legislation during the special session, proponents know the bill could circumvent structural-veto gates and human opposition that would otherwise manifest during a typical session. Capitalizing on the structural orientation of a process geared toward expedience, H.B. 1912’s fans are placing their policy agenda ahead of the good of the system as a whole.
Whether the bill really is necessary to implement the budget is questionable, given its relatively small impact on the 2015-2017 budget. To the extent that proponents insist that is their motivation, they should be willing to decouple the bill’s substantive policy changes from some of its spending provisions. For instance, why not trust the traditional legislative process to sort out whether to shift regulatory authority over certain solar companies to the UTC, given that it’s one of the bill’s most controversial elements and the cost of that shift would be minimal?
Placing policy preferences before institutional process is a recipe for undemocratic outcomes, especially when it comes to sorting out contentious and high-impact issues. Washington’s legislators do neither themselves, nor their constituents, any favors by losing focus on the special session’s larger issue of education funding. They should save solar for another day.
