Soil and Wetland Scientist Certification ~ Hearing pushed to 2009

Hello All,

We want to update you all on the status of our progress with HB-3316 in the 2008 legislative session. We really appreciate all of the support and effort that we have received this session. But we have decided to NOT pursue a committee hearing during this very short legislative session. But we DO plan on coming back ready to go and fully prepared well before the first day of the 2009 session.

As you know, neither we -- nor the legislature, nor DOL, nor any of our supporters or opponents -- received the final draft of the 2008 Sunrise Review report until the 14^th of January – the day the 2008 session started. We had a draft bill of the completely new soil and wetland scientists title act ready. But nobody from various affected agencies or in the legislature wanted to review it until the Sunrise Review report came out. And we thought that it was not prudent to send it out for general review until we had those people’s feedback. But there was no time for that feedback, so we had to do a lot of guess work as to how the bill would be set up and administered through DOL. Also as a result of that late timeline, it was not even assigned a bill number (HB-3198) for several days after session started, losing at least the first week of session and committee meetings. So we did not get it posted to the website for general review until more than a week into the short session.

Then, in an unexpected response to unintended consequences from Tim Eyman’s Initiative 960 (which was voted into law last year, and requires legislative approval as well as full fiscal analyses of any new fees and taxes etc.), our sponsors had to replace our newly posted bill (HB-3198) with another (HB-3316) that had all references to fees removed. This confused many people--proponents and opponents alike.

By that time, we were receiving feedback and comments about the newly drafted bill from several different public agencies, all of whom were either supporting or neutral, but also with concerns about certain aspects of the bill as written.

In addition, due to illness of key staff at DOL, we still have not seen a new fiscal note that reflects lower costs related to our much greater numbers of participants (a result of adding the wetland scientists to our bill). And although we assume the new fiscal note will be much lower than the one from 2006, it is difficult if not impossible to get final approval from our members if they do not know what this program will cost.

Finally, some of our opponents appear to still think we have a practices act. So we are in the process of making direct and clear contact with each of them, and are making sure that they are up to date with our process, in hopes that we can actually gain them as supporters, or at least get them to take a neutral rather than opponent stance on the bill.

If we had to work through any one of these problems, we might have been able to get through committee during this 2008 session. But the combination was overwhelming, and made us realize that we could be much more productive if we just spent the time between this session and next (2009) solving all of those various minor problems.

Just so you know, here are just a couple of examples of what we need to do with the current draft bill:

Because we now have enough people to support a stand-alone program, the DOL prefers that the Advisory Committee report directly to the Director of DOL (rather than through the Geology Board). That will be much more simple. This will also serve to decrease costs, and so will make our fiscal note even less expensive.
For another example, one of our reviewers noted that the word “practice” is in Section 1 of HB-3316, and although the text of the bill is clearly not a practices act, that word must be taken out and replaced with more appropriate text to avoid confusion.

There will be other minor changes, but we will be posting (on this website) the updated version of the bill as soon as we have met with all of our stakeholders, and have made appropriate changes. This is likely to be posted after the 2008 session is over, but we will also post any updates or general information as it comes available. Please contact us through the email link below if you have any questions.

Thanks