Washington Legislature Gets Debt in Earthquake Retrofits for Old School Buildings

Efforts to spur the pace of earthquake retrofits for old, frail school buildings in Washington state passed the legislature unanimously. Evergreen State has lagged behind other West Coast states and counties in reinforcing schools to withstand strong vibrations.

A report by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources last year said tens of thousands of Washington students attend class in buildings at high risk of collapsing in the aftermath of the earthquake. Thousands of children attend low school in the coastal tsunami area.

Stanwood, a Washington parent and PTA volunteer DaleAnn Baker was among a legion of citizen activists who successfully lobbied the legislature to double government spending on earthquake retrofits, or in some cases, to pay most of the cost of moving a public school out of the tsunami area.

“The amount of funding is huge and that’s great. It really shows that the legislature wants to commit to this effort,” Baker said in an interview on Wednesday.

Baker said her journey in activism began a few years ago when she realized that the elementary school where she sends her two children was built in 1956, long before modern seismic safety laws. “How is it acceptable to ask children to go to school in a building that might collapse during an earthquake?” asked the flight engineer herself and the others.

On Wednesday, the Washington Senate voted 49-0 to pass a supplemental state building budget that includes $100 million for earthquake and tsunami safety upgrades for the most vulnerable schools statewide. The action to send the budget bill to the governor’s office followed a similarly lopsided 98-0 vote in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. The new funding for the School Safety Retrofit represents a 150% increase over last year’s level and nearly eight times more than it was just three years ago.

The Oregon Legislature in 2005 established the Scale Adjusted Seismic School Scholarship Program now being launched from Olympia. The British Columbia provincial government started the Schools Earthquake Mitigation Program in 2004 and has committed more than $1.9 billion since then.

The next challenge, Baker said, is to persuade future legislatures to keep Washington state funding at about $100 million every two years.

“It’s going to take some time to do that,” Becker noted. “It will take 10, 15, 20 years to properly make seismic updates to all our school buildings in our state.”

Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of Washington senators proposed a statewide voter referendum to allow the sale of $500 million in bonds to pay for school retrofits over the next decade. But by late February, senior budget writer, Seattle Democrat, David Frucket, said earthquake safety spending could fit into the regular budget for school building, eliminating the unnecessary risk of bond conduct failure.

The money earmarked for this purpose now will come from regular government borrowing, which is repaid through future general tax collection, Fruckett said.

“Providing safe places for children to learn is one of the most serious responsibilities of the state,” Fruckett said in a statement on Wednesday. “The risk of an earthquake or tsunami may seem small in any given place and time, but multiplied by all communities in potentially geologically active areas throughout our state, this problem is urgent.”

Frucket was the lead sponsor this winter of a separate School Seismic Safety Policy bill, which outlines how Washington schools should prioritize seismic retrofitting funding and how much it will cost the state. Qualified K-12 schools must have been built prior to 1998. Local school districts can rely on state and federal funding to cover at least two-thirds of the cost of an earthquake safety project.

Other people and groups that have been lobbying the legislature to take bold action this year include the Washington State District, the Northwest Progressive Institute, various school administrators and a consistent former state representative from the Olympic Peninsula named Jim Buck.

“This is a good first step,” Buck said by email after final approval of the government’s construction budget on Wednesday. “Let’s make sure every mom and pop in the state understands that her job now is to hold her constituents accountable for fixing these schools.”

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