By Polly Keary, Editor
When 39th District State Senator c got home from the legislative session in Olympia last month, he had hoped to get some rest.
Instead, he spent most of the past three weeks in Oso, working to get help to the people who lost everything there.
When he did take an hour to talk about the 2014 legislative session, though, he said that he had been able to accomplish a lot, including helping parks get money; protecting the state from liability in forest fires and preventing people from abandoning boats in public water.
State parks
Parks have struggled through the recession, but Pearson hopes that such budget shortfalls won't happen in the future following the passage of a bill that he sponsored allowing private entities to do some advertising in state parks.
"It allows the parks to get into agreements for private and public partnerships, and we put in an advertising portion so parks are able to do that,GÇ¥ said Pearson. "We built strong parameters so that we aren't competing with local markets and so that you won't see neon signs in parks.GÇ¥
Pearson actually introduced that bill in 2013, and carefully pushed it through for two years.
"It took a lot of work to get that passed this year,GÇ¥ he said. "But the parks are going to need to be more self-sufficient.GÇ¥
Forest fires
In 2002, a company started a fire that burned 18,000 acres of national forest.
The federal government sued the company and won $36.5 million. Only $7.6 million of that was for actual financial cost. The rest was for "intangible environmental damages.GÇ¥
Alarmed, several states wondered what would prevent the federal government from demanding remuneration for intangibles in the event that a forest fire started on state land and spread to forest land.
"Our state forest lands; they pay for school construction, so we needed language in place in case a disaster like that happens,GÇ¥ he said.
Pearson's bill would give federal judges guidance in establishing damages, and those damages would be limited to monetary loss and other measurable damage, while excluding intangibles, which Pearson said were far too unpredictable and potentially ruinous to the state education coffers.
"We are very happy to see it pass,GÇ¥ he said. "It was a big victory, in case something like that happens. Otherwise, you could get any judge to throw out an arbitrary number.GÇ¥
Derelict boats
When a scrap metal dealer bought a 340-ton crab boat called the Deep Sea for $2,500 and brought it to Penn Cove, it turned out being a costly investment.
The Deep Sea caught fire and burned to the waterline before sinking on May 13 of 2012, and the owner had no insurance. It ended up costing the state about $2.5 million to position two large cranes and hoist the hulk off the bottom, but not before Penn Cove's famous mussels had to be closed to harvesting for a while due to spilled fuel.
At the time, it was almost legal for a boat owner to simply abandon a boat in the water. Because a boat is private property, the state didn't have the authority to just grab it, even if it had stayed in a location longer than the 30-day limit.
A lot of times, owners think they are going to fix a boat but never actually do it before the boat becomes a nuisance and hazard to people and the environment, Pearson said.
So he worked for two years on a bill that he finally got passed this spring.
It requires the state some authority to board derelict vessels to assess and correct potential threats to the environment and health and safety. It also funds the program through a $1 surcharge on boat registration. And it makes it easier for the state to seek damages from derelict boat owners.
"I can't think of a better legacy to leave our children than clean waterways, free from polluting vessels,GÇ¥ said Pearson.
Tools of financial fraud
In the Wild West, the possession of a "running ironGÇ¥ was sometimes punishable by hanging.
That is because a running iron was a tool used to alter the brands on livestock in order to steal them.
The modern analog of a running iron might be a "skimmer.GÇ¥
That's a tool that can fit over the keypad on an ATM or gas pump pay station to record the card's pin numbers, and oddly enough, they aren't illegal everywhere.
Pearson introduced a bill to make the tools of financial fraud illegal to own.
"People would put overlays on ATMs and when you slide in your card and pull it out and you don't know there's an overlay, and it's a magnetic strip capturing your information,GÇ¥ said Pearson. "It's unbelievable, the technology. It's scary to see the sophistication.GÇ¥
To Pearson's surprise, although his bill to make it illegal to own skimmers and other tools of financial crime passed unanimously in the Senate, it died in the House.
"I never got a good answer why it didn't pass,GÇ¥ said Pearson. "Apparently it will take another year.GÇ¥
Prescription drugs
One of the most powerful people in the entire health care system is a person of whom most people have never heard.
It's a pharmacy benefit manager, and pharmacy benefit managers have a lot to do with the cost of prescription drugs.
PBMs are independent contractors who work for insurance companies. They serve as intermediaries between pharmacies and insurance companies, and hammer out deals regarding which drugs the insurance companies will cover, how much they will pay, how much the person buying the prescription will pay, and what drugs won't be covered at all.
They have the power to audit pharmacies, and to exclude small pharmacies from deals that benefit big chains.
Pearson started fighting that system, which is still highly unregulated, several years ago with little expectation of success, given the power of the opposition.
But this year, a bill he co-sponsored that added some oversight to the PBM trade and that gave small pharmacies greater equity in accessing prescriptions passed.
"The first year in the House, I had every big pharmaceutical lobbyist against it, and they confused all the legislators, no matter how hard I worked,GÇ¥ he said. "We were able to pass it this year. It was a good step.GÇ¥
Conclusions
Pearson also supported the supplemental state budgets this year, which he called "bare bones.GÇ¥ Although there were a few disappointments; a bill he hoped to pass that would have given tax preferences to small cities with high amounts of industry was not a success, it was overall a good year.
That is, until he got home.
"I'd only been home for a couple weeks, and then the landslide happened,GÇ¥ said Pearson.
In the days that followed, he spent a lot of time with first responders and victims, and he described it as a "war zone.GÇ¥
But, he said, there was a lot that was uplifting in the community's response to the tragedy.
"You can't help but be touched by how hard people are working, the locals alongside FEMA,GÇ¥ he said. "The people are working their hearts out.GÇ¥
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