Queen Anne resident and 36th District Rep. Reuven Carlyle has been throwing support behind House Bill 2561, which if passed would raise $850 from a state bond and allocate it to clean energy construction improvements to schools and universities statewide and create 38,000 “well paying jobs.”
Yesterday he spoke on the House floor in support of the bill, citing a current pilot project at McClure Middle School that he helped secure a million dollars in funding for last year. The project called for an energy audit of the school that identified energy and cost-savings improvements that will begin to be made to the 1960s era building after the current academic term ends this summer. According to Reuven, these improvements are not only necessary to maintaining the infrastructure of Seattle Public Schools–they also provide an extreme value add for the state. Here are some choice excerpts from his speech.
“This is a city that is a net exporter of education tax dollars, in fact in state property taxes received 37 cents for every dollar that it sends to Olympia. And we have a school–600 kids–who walk around in jackets. And they’re cold.”
“Parents and community leaders and students and faculty and teachers and the principal, Sarah Pritchett got together and sat down…and they did an analysis of this very building, McClure Middle School, and that analysis found that for a million dollar investment we could get a return on investment from a financial perspective that was extraordinary.”
“This pilot project is successful. It’s a return on investment that makes sense.”
Read more on the McClure Middle School pilot project here.