One Success Story for Disaster Mitigation

Earlier this year I wrote about the agitation being made to move school seismic safety up the funding ladder here in Washington State. With the dogged determination of Jim Buck and his wife, along with a partnership from many others, a modicum of success has been achieved. This happening in an off budget making yearhere in Washington State, which is pretty extraordinary to have happen. The radio interview below gives you the details. Who says one individual or a couple, can't make a difference!

This story aired on KSQM.

AT RISK SCHOOLS TO RECEIVE EARTHQUAKE / TSUNAMI FUNDS

As the Washington State Legislature moved toward adjournment last week, lawmakers joined together in a rare sweeping bi-partisan effort to approve money to upgrade and retrofit vulnerable schools in earthquake and tsunami zones. Pressed by citizen activists and school officials across the state, legislators did something rarely seen in the legislature – voting unanimously in both the House and Senate to approve $100 million dollars to help pay for earthquake retrofits, and in some cases, to pay most of the cost of relocating a public school out of the tsunami zone. One of those citizen activists was former State Representative Jim Buck of Joyce who, along with his wife Donna, mounted a six month campaign calling on the legislature to address the issue.

“Well I’m pretty excited about it. We went from a dead standing stop, to pass legislation and unanimous House and Senate stuff. So $100 million dollars to begin the process. I think that’s a pretty good step for pretty good work in six months.”_ _ _ The new funding for school seismic safety represents a 150 percent increase over last year’s level, and nearly an eight-fold increase from just three years ago, according the Northwest News Network. It replaces an earlier proposed statewide voter referendum to authorize a

$500 million dollar bond sale to pay for school seismic retrofits.

“More is always better. But if you go ahead and put a $500 million dollar bond on the ballot and it fails, we’ll probably never resurrect the issue. So I’m pleased that we have gone the way that we did. Is a much more responsible spending decision than I think going over above the bonding limit. That’s the way its eventually going to have to work.”_ _ _ The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction will be providing a list of grant applicants to the Governor by the first of September so he can make recommendations to next year’s legislature.

“So my guess is if somebody is sitting out there on a grant application right now and is all set to go they could have money maybe by January, February.”_ _ _ He acknowledges that while $100 million is a good start, he estimates it would cost between 350 to 500 million just to move the schools out of the tsunami zone. Fixing the remaining 440 schools could cost anywhere from 2.9 to three and a half billion dollars.

“This is going to be a very long term project and is something that has to be done.”_