Republican 18th District Rep. Stephanie McClintock will have a slight change in her committees while Rep. John Ley prepares for his first term in office.
The representatives hosted a town hall at Battle Ground City Hall, Dec. 30, where they shared updates on legislative priorities and addressed questions from residents. With the legislative session set to begin on Jan. 13, budget concerns dominated the discussion.
McClintock, now in her second term, and Ley, beginning his first, highlighted the challenges ahead, with a projected budget shortfall taking center stage. While revenue assessments won’t be finalized until the legislative session begins, many lawmakers anticipate a gap of approximately $12 billion, compared with the previous biennial budget. Ley told attendants the shortfall could potentially deepen by an additional $6 billion.
“The fire hose is about to start in Olympia. Overwhelmingly, the budget’s gonna be the biggest arm wrestling we face,” Ley said.
Legislative updates
Ley, a first-time legislator, will serve on the Environment & Energy Committee, where he plans to tackle the challenges of meeting the state’s 2035 mandate for electric vehicle adoption.
“We’ve got our amazing Columbia River system, Snake River and all the dams, and we have the cheapest electricity in the nation because of our hydroelectric power generation, so I’m excited to get in that and especially what we need to do with the already-mandated switch to electric vehicles. We don’t have the ability to actually generate the electricity needed in 2035 that goes with that mandate, let alone transport it to where the people are,” Ley said.
Ley will also serve on the Postsecondary Education & Workforce Committee and the Transportation Committee. One of his key goals is to push for a no-toll option for the Interstate 5 Bridge to ensure affordable transportation for Washingtonians.
McClintock announced a small shift in her committee assignments. She will step away from the Education Committee to join the Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee, leveraging her experience in public affairs for the agriculture industry.
“I do work in the [agricultural] industry, so it’s something I’m interested in, and I think I can add a different perspective, too,” McClintock said. “I’m gonna continue serving as assistant ranking on [the] Capital Budget [Committee], which gives me an opportunity to sit in the negotiations table when we go back and forth and divvy up funding to our local projects. So that puts me in a great position to bring some dollars back home.”
McClintock will also continue to serve as a ranking member of the Consumer Protection & Business Committee.
Community concerns
After legislative updates, residents raised a range of concerns to the representatives. One constituent highlighted frustrations with the healthcare system while advocating for her pregnant teenage daughter, who faces barriers to prenatal care despite being a high-risk Medicaid recipient.
McClintock identified the issue as part of a larger systemic challenge related to Medicaid reimbursement rates. She mentioned that a local obstetrics provider with whom she is familiar is selling her practice due to the inability to maintain financial sustainability with 25% of her patients relying on Medicaid. The obstetrician reportedly cannot accept any more Medicaid patients as the reimbursement rates do not cover even half the costs of providing prenatal care.
“I know Sen. Cleveland is switching, and she’s no longer gonna be chair of the Healthcare [Committee}, but I’ve talked to her over this last year about increasing Medicaid rates because if doctors … can’t even afford to stay in business, then they can’t take the patients, and that’s been part of the problem,” McClintock said.
Another unnamed local who claimed they were a pharmacist shared a personal story about her daughter, who died of cardiac arrest weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. She claimed her daughter’s death, which she believes was related to the vaccination, was not properly identified by the autopsy report. She expressed frustration over what she felt was a lack of acknowledgment of potential vaccine-related risks.
“There is a war on our children, and this has to change. It has to change. Our children, above anything else, our children must come first,” she said.
Ley responded by emphasizing the importance of informed consent, arguing that health care providers had not sufficiently communicated the potential risks of vaccines to their patients. He expressed hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could be appointed as the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, believing he could influence changes in how vaccines are approached at the federal level.
“I would like to think that we learned an awful lot from the past pandemic. I mean, clearly, you’ve not only learned, you’ve experienced an awful lot of negative outcomes,” Ley told the guest. “Washington state had the longest [state of] emergency in the nation, and to me, that’s appalling that you give the governor that long. I think it was 975 days that he had this emergency set of powers, in essence, to dictate so many aspects of people’s lives.”
Later in the meeting, Joe Zimmerman, owner of Bi-Zi Farms in Clark County and a previous candidate for the Clark County Council Fourth District seat last year, expressed his concerns about the state’s minimum wage rising to $16.66, from $16.28 last year. Zimmerman argued a higher minimum wage closes opportunities for youth.
“I’ve got a neighbor across the street from my house. He’s a high-functioning gentleman, and his mom gave me a call a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘Can you please give him a job?’ He had lost his job recently,” Zimmerman recalled. “I love him to death, but I can’t trust him to stay on task, and if I could pay him $6 to $7 an hour, you bet I’d hire him in a heartbeat. I just can’t afford to pay him that.”
Ley agreed, reflecting on his own experiences working on a farm as a teenager, picking strawberries and earning money by the pound. These early lessons, he noted, taught him valuable skills. Frustrated by what he sees as excessive regulation, Ley emphasized the importance of such formative experiences.
“It was a great way to grow up, you know, and you learn very quickly — oh, you brought a brown bag for lunch, you froze your soda pop because by the time you got to lunch, it had thawed out and was still chilly,” Ley said. “You had to plan when to take your lunch break. The bus showed up at a specific time, and if you missed it, you didn’t earn any money that day, so you made sure to show up. There were so many wonderful lessons as a young person, and I would just love to see the state take their hands off that great way for our young people to get started.”
