FUNDING FOR FISH, WILDLIFE AND RELATED OUTDOOR RECREATION AND EDUCATION DRAFT MEETING #5 SUMMARY Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Transcription

1 FUNDING FOR FISH, WILDLIFE AND RELATED OUTDOOR RECREATION AND EDUCATION DRAFT MEETING #5 SUMMARY Tuesday, May 17, 2016 ATTENDANCE Name Affiliation Attended Task Force Members Sen. Chris Edwards OR Legislature Yes Sen. Doug Whitsett OR Legislature Phone Rep. Ken Helm OR Legislature Phone Rep. Wayne Krieger OR Legislature Phone Mike Finley ODFW Commission Chair No Scott Welch Columbia Sportswear Yes Rob Morrison Leupold & Stevens Corp. Yes Claire Puchy Retired; City of Portland Yes Robb Ball The Nature Conservancy Phone Kenji Sugahara OR Bicycle Racing Association Yes Meryl Redisch Retired; Portland Audubon Yes Bruce Taylor OR Habitat Joint Venture Yes Mark Labhart Tillamook County Board of Commissioners, Chair Yes Tricia Tillman Multnomah County Health Dept. Phone Queta Gonzalez Center for Diversity & Environment Phone Kari Westlund Travel Lane County Yes Nancy Bales Gray Family Foundation Phone Jim Martin Retired Yes Brad Pettinger Oregon Trawl Commission Yes Mike Herbel Neskowin Store Yes Paul Donheffner OR Hunters Association Yes Curt Melcher ODFW Director Yes James Nash 6 Ranch No Project Management Team Jim Owens Facilitator -- Cogan Owens Greene No Alisha Morton Associate -- Cogan Owens Greene Yes Brett Brownscombe Natural Resource Policy Advisor, Governor s Office Yes Beth Patrino Committee Services Yes Roger Fuhrman ODFW Director s Office Yes WELCOME Introductions Mark Labhart, Chair, called the meeting to order. He asked for a round of introductions from task force members, staff and public. 1

2 Approach to Meeting Mark reviewed the agenda and approach to the meeting. He said that Jim Owens, Facilitator, is out of the country so he and staff will handle Jim s role today. HOUSEKEEPING ITEMS Supporting Materials Beth Patrino reviewed the meeting materials and said they are all available online here: May Legislative Days Briefings Beth said that Mark will be briefing the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee next week. PUBLIC COMMENT Fergus Mclean read his full written testimony that is available online here: DISCUSSION OF TASK FORCE SURVEY RESULTS Mark said that Roger Fuhrman took the lead on pulling together the survey and the survey results. He said that everybody responded but one person. Roger reviewed his report on the survey results, which is available online here: Mark said there was some discussion about who can and cannot vote because we have voting and non-voting members on the task force. He said this is not where we are making a final vote on the task force decision so all members were asked to participate in this survey. There were no objections. Mark said we have Tier 1 that is the top grouping that we want to go through today. LTF members agreed with this approach. Several suggested that the group review Tier 1 and then go into other items as needed and also that there could be items in lower tiers that could be part of a package. Brad Pettinger asked if we are looking to implement a certain number of these or if it is a suite that we are looking for. Mark said we are not stuck on anything yet. We want to put the top 8-10 forward for further review. He said today we are just trying to fill in the blanks of what these proposals are. It s up to the task force what we actually put forward and how many. Idea #1 - Marijuana Tax Meryl Redisch said she would like to know who else might be interested in this revenue. Senator Chris Edwards said law enforcement for one, but he is sure there are others that are looking at this as well. He said it is hard to know until they actually start pursuing it. 2

3 Paul Donheffner said for this and all proposals we need some kind of detailed fiscal impact assessment. He said once we have the top to review we need the numbers. Senator Doug Whitsett said marijuana is against the federal law and the federal government may not allow this going forward so he cautioned against putting all our eggs in this basket. He said the nexus between marijuana and outdoor recreation is litigious at best. Senator Whitsett agreed with Paul about needing the fiscal impacts. Jim Martin said when considering each idea it is important to ask if it will get us where we need to be or do we have to put a combination of ideas together. He said there are advantages to having one idea that helps raise all the money versus a stew of ideas. He is not sure a marijuana tax is big enough. He said we should consider if there is a logical connection to conservation and that there will be a much stronger message when going out to the public, Legislature etc., if there is relevance between a broad funding approach and conservation. A third thing to consider is the political do-ability between new money and taking from old money that is already allocated. Kenji Sugahara would like to know the cost of implementation. He asked if there is a new tax is there a mechanism in place to collect the funds. Mike Herbel agreed with what Senator Whitsett and Jim said. He said the marijuana thing is moving quickly and nobody knows what it is going to look like and he is uncomfortable with pinning a process like this on it. It s the big new honey pot that everybody wants a part of and it will continue to have more people pile into it. Bruce Taylor agreed with Jim s comments but said he was a little more lenient on the nexus to the funding source. Scott Welsh agreed with all the previous comments. He added that we should be looking for match funding for the federal dollars as well. Claire Puchy agreed with Jim as well. She said she is interested in more new money and is looking ahead to what kind of campaign or convincing that we would have to do to Legislature and public and the stronger the nexus the better. Scott said fish and wildlife benefit of the entire state not just hikers, fishers and hunters. If we can show the state the benefit then we have a much better chance of getting it through. Kari Westlund said it s about conservation not recreation necessarily and there is a nexus between growing marijuana and conservation. Jim said he voted for the marijuana tax proposal but it was not his favorite. He would like to know how much money would be generated and who it would take from. 3

4 Mark agreed that we need more financial information. He would like to know what has been generated to date and what is the projected revenue for He asked if LFO could help us with that. Senator Edwards said yes. Bruce would like to know if we are talking about an allocation of existing tax revenues or whether we are talking about an additional percentage sales tax or excise tax. He said they are two very different things as one is taking from others and one is a new source. Senator Edwards asked how much information task force members want about the politics surrounding each issue / proposal. He said he could share how difficult each item will be, but at some point the task force has to come up with some recommendation. He would like to share a legislator s perspective but does not want to be a wet blanket to the whole process. He asked what is the most useful for task force members in how we move forward in developing recommendations. Kenji said a political analysis would be very useful so that we re not shooting in the dark. Scott said each of the task force members offer our personal opinion so he does not think its bad to have Senator Edwards perspective as well. He said we can take his comments like we would anyone s comments on the task force. Several other task force members agreed. Beth said the questions she heard that need to be answered include: Who else might be interested in this revenue? What the current allocation is and how far into the future that applies? What is the potential for revenue? What is the cost of implementation administrative and collection mechanism? Tricia Tillman said additionally she would like to know what counties have opted out of selling recreational marijuana. Kenji added that California Department of Fish and Wildlife has looked into how much marijuana growth impacts fish and wildlife. This creates a nexus. Idea #2 Recreation Equipment Tax Mark said administrative costs came up in the survey. He would like to know how much we are talking about and how much could it raise. Scott said for him the biggest question is what are you going to tax. He also asked how we draw the nexus to conservation and outdoor equipment. Rob agreed and said a basic question about backpacks for example is how you differentiate between school backpacks and outdoor backpacks. Scott said he is concerned that this would tax the hunters/ fishers through their gear instead of taxing through increased license / tag fees. 4

5 Meryl said for her it s purchasing skis, optics, tennis rackets or any sports related equipment of that sort. She said she was not thinking about clothes but rather the products that get people outdoors. Jim said it might be helpful to ask the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies for the analysis they had on this idea. Mark agreed that it would be interesting to know the pros and cons and why they didn t choose it at the federal level. Roger said this is in the presentation that Patricia Allen did on the Blue Ribbon Panel. He said they can find out more details from them. Mike said he is stuck on implementation of this idea. He said in the absence of a sale tax, he does not know how you go about collecting revenue on outdoor goods. Also deciding what goods we want to be collecting on will be difficult. He asked how internet sales effect the industry because everybody goes online because it is convenient and usually cheaper. Senator Edwards agreed with what Mike and Jim both said. He said with the burner phone fee, the Legislature came up with something with retailers. Idea #16 Bottle Water Fee Mark asked if the proposal is for looking at additional revenue than what is currently collected or if it is a share of the $.05. Paul said there is a deposit on a single serving bottle water and that one way to collect it would be a $.07 deposit and get $.05 back. Or the other way to do it would be at the wholesale level. Senator Whitsett said adding deposit would be troublesome to bottlers, wholesalers etc. There is quite an interesting dynamic there about who gets what and who gets the proceeds. He does not think adding to the deposit is worth it and it would have to be a tax instead. Jim said he voted for it because he wants to know more about it. He said he would urge us to not drop these ideas but flesh out what we need to know and then in June weigh it out with our criteria. Jim said none of these will be easy, but our Senators on the committee will help us figure out the feasibility. Paul said hopefully LFO and LRO could come up with a better idea of units sold and then we could look at the rate. Senator Edwards asked if this is being proposed at the distributor level. Paul said that would be one way to do it or through the deposit mechanism, whichever is more doable. Senator Edwards said different stakeholders are effected differently at the retail versus wholesale level. Paul said that he was thinking about it at the wholesale level. Mike said as a retailer, it seems it would be the clearest path at the distributor level. Meryl said the distributor could then pass that cost onto the consumers. Mike said if we came up with a $.05 tax to the distributor then it would cost the retailers $.08 and the consumer $.10. Senator Edwards said if our recycling levels didn t hit 80% by a certain date, which they haven t, then the deposit goes from $.05 to $.10 on April 1, He said he is not sure what happens with the extra $.05. Beth said she does not think the legislation has identified that yet. Senator Edwards said the 5

6 deposit goes up, but is still collectable by the consumer so it is the escheatment that we are talking bout. Beth said the questions she heard that need to be answered include: How many bottles of water are sold in Oregon each year? What is the revenue generated at the wholesale level? What happens to the extra $.05 when the deposit goes up? Idea #27 Fixed Proportion of General Lottery Funds to Conservation Jim said he proposed this idea to put the Missouri model on the table. He would like to know what percentage of the general fund or lottery fund would actually be required to accomplish the goal. He said he knows this would be politically difficult but that Missouri has been able to defend it because they are taking such a small portion of the fund. He believes that $20 million for ODFW would not be a high fraction of the general fund / lottery fund together. He said we need to know the political feasibility as well. Meryl asked what the current lottery funds are and the projection. Brett Brownscombe said it has been going up but has plateaued. He said this came up in another meeting and if it was 1.5% of the unallocated portion of the lottery funding it would be $10 million / biennium. Senator Whitsett said currently 18% goes to education by constitutional amendment, 15% to parks and recreation, 25% goes to debt service on lottery service bonds and the remainder is constitutionally directed to economic development. He said the original thought was that ODFW, OWEB and Parks & Recreation missions are overlapping and that it might be possible to consolidate some of the functions and services to use some of that 15%, which is $150 million over two years. Senator Edwards said the task force would have to go straight to the voters on this as the current Legislature won t pass it. Curt Melcher said that currently ODFW has $35 million from the general fund in the budget as well as $4.6 million from the lottery fund. Curt said if ODFW received general fund match associated with every license sold it would incentivize all of us to improve our sale of licenses and in a way it would be a dedicated portion of general fund. Jim said he does not like the match idea because it does not match Missouri, which is the most successful model, and we should try to emulate it. He said if we are optimistic that hunting / fishing licenses will grow then this would be a good alternative but he does not believe that will be the case. He said we should not continue to tie revenue to solely hunting / fishing but rather a broad base. There was agreement from task force members. Brett said this will pull lottery money away from economic development as we are not creating new money. He said we need to consider where the Legislature would take money away from if it s allocating funding here. Jim said he wanted to make sure that we had two proposals on the table that 6

7 were similar to Missouri. One reallocates current funds and one creates new funding. This kind of proposal would require a ballot initiative and would require a constitutional change. Paul asked what percentage of the general fund would be needed. Jim said whatever percentage is needed to get us what we need. Curt said it s more complicated than that as ODFW already gets general fund. Idea #28 Wildlife License Plate Mark said survey respondents want to know the fiscal impact. Senator Edwards said ODOT has that information readily available and when each vanity plate expires. Brett asked the legislators what their sense is about how much vanity plate holders get cranky with more coming into the system. Senator Edwards said every session there are a handful of license plate bills and that every couple of session a new one passes that is usually a pet project of a legislator. Roger said it would be helpful to know if folks were buying the plates like the Crater Lake plate because they are interested in conservation. Idea #4 Portion of Beverage Deposits Mark asked how much an additional $.05 would provide. Rob asked if there is an estimate on the unclaimed deposit when it goes to $.10. Kenji asked what the difference is between a fee and a tax and how they are treated. Senator Whitsett said they struggle with this question every legislative session. He said a fee must have a benefit to the person paying the fee and a charge that is made against all people whether they receive a benefit or not is a tax. Kenji asked how many beverages were sold in Oregon per year that are subject to the bottle tax. Representative Ken Helm said the Association of Oregon Recyclers has looked carefully at the unclaimed bottle deposit and they would be as a great resource. He said it would be nice to get some clarity on whether there is an actual ability to cash in on the unclaimed deposits. Mark asked if current retailers get a fee for the bottle deposit. Kenji said the retailer collects the money. Mike said retailers get charged by the distributor for every piece that they sell. Then it is up to the retailer to collect. He said the program is great, but at the same time he hates it as a retailer. Idea #5 Surcharge on Tax Returns Mike said he was looking for a mechanism that confronts the issues head on that all Oregonians are beneficiaries of this beautiful state and all should contribute to protecting it. He said every person files a tax return or is at least supposed to. He said we could apply a flat fee on the form and everybody pays it i.e. a conversation fund fee. Mike said there could be an offset for a person purchasing a license to 7

8 avoid double taxation. If one wants to argue that there is a lack of equitability in fishers / hunters able to enjoy the offset then we could include a parks pass that offsets it as well. It can grow as our population grows. There are currently 1.6 million tax filers. Meryl asked what amount Mike was thinking because $1 / return is not enough. Mike said he was thinking $25 / return. Scott said this is a great idea. He said first we need to see if it is legal. And second, we would need to protect it so that every other agency doesn t add a fee on it. Bruce said there are ways to make it more equitable i.e. $10, $15 and $20 depending on level of tax return amount. Kari said she didn t think we would necessarily need to do any proposed exemptions. Meryl said hunters / anglers are consuming a resource so they are paying a license fee. She said this is a conservation fee and everyone should pay. We could make it separate from the consumptive fee. Idea #20 Tourism or Impact Fee (combined with Rental car tax) Kari said current tax varies around the state from 6-16% depending on the local jurisdiction taxes that are levied against the state taxes. Mark said as he understood it Mike Finley was saying that people come to our state to recreate and they should pay a tourism impact fee. Mark asked how much money this would generate and suggested that we get this information from Travel Oregon. Bruce said it would vary because counties have varying taxes. Kari said airports might be the easiest way to do this and that Dean Runyan Associates might have this information. Idea #25 Lottery Fund Allocation Rob asked how this is different from Jim s idea #27. Jim said the only difference is that he was looking at the target amount from ODFW and the percentage would go from that. He said that this lists a certain percentage and it is only lottery not general fund. Mark asked what would 1% of the lottery fund generate. Curt said the ratios of lottery revenues that are distributed are 50% to price pool and 50% into lottery fund. He would like to know if that is constitutional. He said potentially there could be new revenue there that doesn t take away from other programs but instead the prize pool. Idea #32 1% for Oregon s Wildlife Program 8

9 John Goodall, a member of the public, said they proposed this idea through Claire. He said it is a market-based approach similar to the 1% for the Planet that businesses from tourism to agriculture products to outdoor gear vendors could voluntarily adopt. Meryl said this is intriguing but she wonders if folks who are choosing to participate would understand that their money would go to deferred maintenance and not directly to conservation. John said perhaps people could chose where their funding was going. Jim said he is interested in what the outdoor industry association would have to say about this proposal. Scott said he could talk to Peter Bragdon about this. He said he would like to know what the 1% actually covers and that the this task force would have to decide what we would dedicate it to. Rob said 1% for Conservation is an organization and he can forward more information on it. Brett asked what would be the collection entity and can ODFW legally accept these types of funds. Curt said they already accept donations so that would not be a problem. Others Kenji said for idea #4c under the beverage deposit proposal is really more in line with idea #16 for the bottled water tax. He asked if state parks would be interested in working on it collaboratively. Brett said we can ask state parks. Kari said we should consider if general fund dollars will stop if ODFW is getting funding from other sources i.e. marijuana tax funding or if general fund dollars remain the same despite alternative funding sources. DISCUSS WHAT WE WANT TO ACCOMPLISH AT THE JUNE 8 MEETING Mark said staff has the questions that the task force wants answered and they will work through the data collection as quickly as possible. He suggested one option may be to go through all the information for the proposals at the June meeting and start the process on identifying what is going to stick and what isn t. Jim said it would be really helpful to have polling information on the proposals and how likely they are to be approved by voters. Mark said the plan is to do a second round of polling but funding has not yet been secured. He said this information will not be available by the June meeting. He said that it might be more beneficial to do the polling for the vital few towards the end, as it would make the task force results more valid as we go to the Legislature. Mark said the original thinking for the June meeting would be to break into two subgroups to review the proposals. He said he thinks that it would be more powerful to have the entire group discuss these things. Task force members agreed. Roger said at the June meeting the full task force could talk about the funding proposals and then break out into the work groups to talk about marketing, branding, etc. 9

10 Meryl said she is not sure that the poll that is happening now will provide us with information on equity and underserved communities. Perhaps that is for the next step when we break out in groups and have a subcommittee look at proposals through the equity lens. Brett said staff was thinking there are two lenses the what and the how. He said the how is how are we going to fund the what. He said we should have a pretty good idea on funding mechanisms before we distill the what. Brett said the work groups are intended to distill the what. He said staff will need to work with LRO and LFO as well as other agencies to obtain all the information that task force members requested. He said he does not think staff can get it all done by June 8. Brett said if we don t have the questions answered by June 8 then it will be the work groups and if we do then we would review the proposals. Kenji asked when in the process would we go out to the organizations that might be negatively impacted by what we propose. He said if we engage early enough in the process to get buy in it will make it easier on the backend. Mark said the key to all this is that we all have to take off our hats for our interests. He said we all need to be talking to our interests groups and getting that buy in. Jim said there are major business interests as well that could be key power players / champions to this process. He said we should start thinking about the campaign that we want to do in the fall. Scott agreed and said that was a key message from the Blue Ribbon Panel. He said that until you talk to the power players they might not see conservation funding benefits. Mark said he will need to discuss this with staff but it appears that we won t have the answers to all the questions for the June meeting so we will do the work groups in June and then we will look at the proposals at the following meeting. Queta Gonzales said that one of the lenses that we need to include in the questions is whether there are groups that are disproportionally impacted by the proposals. PUBLIC COMMENT Fergus Mclean said the task force should consider why this agency is in so much trouble and if it makes sense to throw money at it. He said it is not a conservation agency, it is a hunting / fishing agency because they have not done the surveys. Meryl said she would like to know what kind of conservation education ODFW is looking to do and how far it would go. Curt said ODFW has a number of ideas but they are certainly interested in feedback. He said they would be reaching out to the effected communities to ask them what they want and they don t have any pre-decisional program in mind. Meryl said she is on the fence right now as to whether the agency should be doing environmental educational programs because there are so many other agencies doing similar work. She said she is not 10

11 convinced that is where the funding should be put as opposed to biologists and wildlife managers to get to the answers. Curt said that is good feedback. He said ODFW gets requests from educational institutions wanting ODFW staff to come talk to their class about a variety of topics. He said right now it is a sit back and wait for the requests to come in and they think it may be better to be proactive in engaging these groups. ADJOURN Mark said the June 8 meeting is scheduled for 1 4 pm but suggested 10 am 4 pm instead. Participants agreed. Meeting adjourned at 3:52 pm. 11