When is an oil fee not an oil fee?

"“It's fun to have a bill that feels like it has momentum,” says Brendon Cechovic of Washington Conservation Voters. This is something different from the proposed $1.50-per-barrel oil fee to fund stormwater projects that Cechovic and his colleagues took to Olympia a few weeks back. That would have raised an estimated $120 million per year.

 

It was probably the enviros' most ambitious effort in this hard-times legislative session. They no longer plan to introduce it. What happened? Cechovic explains that key legislators said this just didn't seem like the year to pass such a bill. So the coalition has come up with an alternative: increase the existing Hazardous Substance Tax that was created by an initiative to the legislature in 1988.

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