WA Policy Center: Only 0.5% of CCA funds went to flooding — mostly for planning

As Washington faced historic flooding, Todd Myers, the Vice President for Research at the Washington Policy Center, questioned how much money from the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) went toward flood relief.

Myers noted one of the selling points of the CO2 tax, which is part of the CCA, was funding for flood prevention.

“The state just released a detailed list of where it spent $1.5 billion from the CO2 tax in the first two years,” Myers said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio.

Myers found out that just over $7 million was spent on flooding, which is 0.5% of the total amount that was spent. He also pointed out how those funds were allocated.

“The other thing to note is that much, or maybe most of that money was actually not spent on projects, not actually doing things on the ground. It was spent on staffing and planning so that we can do projects in the future,” he said.

Myers added that more money has been budgeted for the future.

“It takes a long time to do projects. That’s actually a problem — we need to fix that — we need to be able to do projects more rapidly. But in total, there’s about $17 million of the new money that’s budgeted, still that’s a very small amount,” Myers said.

“Now, had we spent more, would we have stopped these floods? Of course not. These are historic floods. But what you do here is: Oh, these floods show why we need to do these things. What’s going to happen under climate change, why these programs are so important, and then they don’t actually spend the money on the program,” he continued.

Listen to the full discussion in the video above.

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