Democratics Sen. Hasegawa at January’s protest at Sea-Tac
As Seattle looks to pull its money out of financial institutions like Wells Fargo with skin in the game of profiting from projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Washington Sen. Bob Hasegawa is introducing a bill to create a state bank:
Senate Bill 5464 is modeled after the successful Bank of North Dakota (BND), which has successfully implemented it’s economic development and public support mission for almost a hundred years. The BND reported its 12th consecutive year of record profits for the state, which includes the period through the great recession and the ups and downs of the oil markets.
“The Washington Investment Trust will keep taxpayer dollars in our state working for Washingtonians instead of Wall Street,” 11th District rep Hasegawa said in an announcement of the bill. “It will generate revenue, but also save money and provide public financing options by loaning money to ourselves rather than going through big banks and bond brokers.”
According to Hasegawa’s announcement, Washington sets aside over $1 billion per year in operating budget for debt service.
“Instead of paying profits to bankers, we could be borrowing from and repaying ourselves,” Hasegawa said.
You can read more about the bill at app.leg.wa.gov.
This bill missed the policy cutoff in both the House and the Senate and won’t be considered further this year.
Yep – this article is about 3 weeks too late.
What is still alive is a measure that would allow localities to deal with credit unions (instead of only banks) for deposits. That would be helpful to Seattle with the whole divestment thing.
http://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1209&Year=2017
As for future public banking news and action, I suggest checking this out:
http://www.seattlepublicbanking.org/