- Frank Chopp: condescending to students.
Yesterday, the Associated Students of University of Washington (ASUW), which represents over 30,000 UW undergrads, hosted a student empowerment banquet, and in doing so, they managed to do something that the Seattle City Council doesn’t often attempt: They brought Seattle’s legislative delegation to the table to fight for their issues. But they were to be disappointed. Even though the students came armed with three detailed, specific legislative proposals in preparation for the special session that begins in three weeks, their legislators seemed blindsided, uninformed, and tone deaf.
In brief, their proposals: (1) Cut $80 million in annual tax exemptions for large tech firms that benefit most from a strong in-state education system; (2) grant community colleges the authority to ask their communities for funding using property tax levies; (3) allow the UW’s $1.83 billion endowment to invest in something other than government bonds to make more money.
But when asked what he thought of those proposals, House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-43) said “I’ll comment when I read them.”
Which was surprising, considering these proposals had been out for a full day and Chopp was one of the banquet’s featured speakers. Instead of addressing smart proposals, Chopp delivered a condescending speech about the basics of lobbying the legislature (to a savvy student body who just pulled together a banquet of power players and a host of well-researched proposals). It was like lecturing Julia Child on how to boil an egg.
In addition to his central role in legislative affairs as House Speaker, Chopp also represents the 43rd district, which includes the University of Washington. In the past three years, state funding for UW has been cut by 50 percent.
But rather than take responsibility or talk about a road map out of this spiral of defunding education, Chopp talked for 20 minutes in platitudes about “human infrastructure,” “jobs,” “opportunity,” “creativity,” “boredom,” and “accountability.” He talked about how he makes his caucus stand and applaud student speakers because it makes everyone feel good. He encouraged students to think of themselves as more than “just” students. His only sentence that actually related to the students’ legislative agenda (his understanding evidently gleaned from ASUW Government Relations director Andrew Lewis’ intro): “I want to thank you for including the community colleges in your effort.”
He ended on this note: “Yes, times are tough, but don’t get depressed. Get organized. Get energized.” He couldn’t have found a room in Seattle with more organized and energized students, with more concrete, sellable, well-designed policy—and he disappointed them by not putting half the effort into the evening that they obviously had.
One member of my table said it was the third time he’d heard this speech. Searching for concrete meaning amidst the generic bullshit, I asked Adam Sherman, Vice President of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, for comment: “He will set the tone in the house, and where he comes down on this will set the tone for where this thing will go in the future.”
Well, Jesus. That doesn’t bode well.
Other representatives in attendance offered guarded support for the UW proposals—Representative Hans Zeiger (R-25) said that he was “sympathetic to” closing loopholes on large tech firms, and “intrigued by” new community college levy authority. Legislative wunderkind Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34) had some choice waffling to offer: Although he could get behind all three proposals with some minor quibbles, “You can’t ever look at one section of the budget in a vacuum.” Well played, Padawan.
Guess Chopp is going to roll over for the GOP again.
When do we get to replace this ass hat?
Glad to hear one person can make all that happen for you, Intern. And I’d 100% take Hans Zeiger at his word on everything he says here. After all, he’s usually making speeches advocating “outside the box” solutions to state issues like these:
http://www.queerty.com/wa-state-house-ca…
http://blog.thenewstribune.com/politics/…
That’s some savvy reporting there, Intern. Can’t wait until you start voting.
Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.
-WS Burroughs
Chris Gregoire and the Seattle delegation are the best Republicans money can buy.
A real budget would expire all tax giveaways for a “fiscal emergency” and require reauthorization votes where any “exemptions” would have to be balanced with a new tax.
And start with a baseline of 50 percent of total funds all going to primary education from K-12 including full day kindergarten. As the State Constitution requires.
@4 Yep, sounds like ASUW to me, too.
Only in a room full of entitled kids is raising property taxes ever popular but hopefully many will become middle aged property owners. Before we pick the pockets of already burdened tax payers why don’t we examine some of the salaries at UW? I think their president makes about 900k. Our governor makes about a third of that.
@7 – doesn’t the football coach make something like $1.8 million?
@8 Yes, but luckily the team makes the money to pay the coach by itself so taxpayers aren’t on the hook for his salary.
We need redistricting to tweak his boundaries so we can have someone actually compete with him. Such a douche canoe.
another great lesson in american democracy.
Tired, tired, tired of Frank Chopp. Never answers phone calls or e-mails. I hope someone runs against him soon.
You get what you vote for gang.
@7 And he pulls in a lot more than that in donations. Not to mention that running a big organization like the UW requires the kind of person that can run a big organization and they demand pretty high salaries.
Please raise my property taxes. I’ll happily pay more.
“Savvy students”?
Yeah, we’ll get to you after we restore medicine to the sick, care to the dying and textbooks to the kids.
Show some savvy & humanity & start you allegedly mighty intellectual muscles on solutions for someone other than yourselves and maybe you’d be taken seriously when it came to you.
Otherwise, you’re just another special interest group like the rest of us and, frankly, not very good at it. You come Olympia and every generation of you is lunch meat.
You’re no a whit different than any other self-serving pomposities down here – just less experienced and most of us were “savvy” in college too.
Intern makes me want to go puke in my granola.
“(3) allow the UW’s $1.83 billion endowment to invest in something other than government bonds to make more money.”
The fact that this incredibly terrible idea got past the brainstorming stage was probably taken by the politicians as proof that it would be safe to dismiss this group of people entirely.
#1 what hallucigenic (sp?) world are you living in? chopp barely acknowledges the gop in olympia–they are not in the majority. maybe chopp realizes that he cannot just be the 43rd district rep because as speaker, he has to balance the interests outside of seattle (i.e. the mainstream of the state) with seattle interests (i.e. interests aligned with hugo chavez).
also he really doesn’t care abuot higher ed that much. he wants to make sure solid ground keeps getting fed our tax money so when he retires he can go back to running the place.
in terms of getting rid of high-tech tax breaks, that money is better used for R&D and creating jobs that trying to fill a massive hole created by the legislature when they overspent on useless social services and health care when the state was rolling in real estate excise tax.
maybe the students should look at SEIU and the public employee unions–that is where higher ed money is going–into their health care and pensions.