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Biography (max 750 char)
Will began his career at union-affiliated voter contact organizations, before serving as a public elementary school teacher. After law school, he clerked for Justice Elena Kagan on the U.S. Supreme Court and worked as a clean energy and environmental lawyer, then moved to Seattle to serve as a federal prosecutor for over five years. In that role, Will prosecuted January 6th rioters, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and environmental crime, and served as the Civil Rights Coordinator, investigating hate crimes and civil rights violations by officers. Will is now a consumer attorney, and has sued oil companies, tobacco companies, utility companies, and AI and social media companies for harms to consumers, cities, and states.
My top budget priority would be fixing our regressive tax system in a way that emphasizes and protects public education and pre-K funding, protects Climate Commitment Act and other environmental funds, and promotes expanding funding for evidence-based, successful social programs, infrastructure and transit grants, etc. Additional revenue could come from a variety of sources, including, for example, an AI tax, lifting the cap on the tax surcharge on large advanced computing corporations, and fixing our state's unwieldy and ineffective B&O tax to protect low-margin businesses and tax corporate profits.
The state can pass legislation promoting the use of ranked-choice voting in local elections, introduce democracy vouchers for state legislative races, and explore whether to follow the lead of other states like Hawaii in rewriting our corporate code to prohibit state-chartered corporations from making political donations.
The most effective state-level strategies are evidence-based and pair a public health approach with real accountability for offenders. Good models include Baltimore's gun violence reduction strategy, which reduced gun violence while improving violent crime clearance rates, and alternative responder models, in which trained specialists respond to, e.g non-violent mental health calls, reducing 911 response times and freeing up officers to investigate serious crime. Appropriate diversion programs for the right populations of defendants are cheaper and lead to rehabilitation and less recidivism. Finally, investing in hiring/training officers and detectives for investigative task forces could yield significant returns in reducing sex trafficking, online child abuse, fraud, and other crimes.
I support some of the novel approaches that have been floated (e.g., news vouchers). Public, unbiased journalism is a public good. At the same time, we should recognize that social media and algorithmic news delivery have contributed massively to the disinformation and division we experience in civil society today. The problem is not, that is, limited to an absence of funding for good journalism; the problem is that good journalism is rarely conveyed to readers, because our online news mechanisms do not prioritize accuracy or good journalism over clickbait and disinformation. Efforts to support local journalism thus have to be paired with aggressive regulation of social media companies, which I have proposed.
I support efforts to permit redistricting, including mid-decade redistricting, that are conditioned on other states having aggressively engaged in partisan gerrymandering, as we saw this past cycle. That's not because partisan gerrymandering is good; it's not, and benefits nobody in the long run. But unilaterally disarming when other states have effectively disenfranchised broad swaths of voters with absurd partisan gerrymanders does little more than assist in rewarding such gerrymandering in those states and entrenching one party in power. While there are de-escalatory solutions to partisan gerrymandering that could be pursued at the federal level on a bipartisan basis, Washington declining to ever engage in what other states are doing only further incentivizes them to do it.
Our district faces many challenges, but many (climate change, affordability, etc.) receive a lot of attention. The challenge that has received the least attention relative to its looming impact is artificial intelligence (and our relationship with technology more broadly). Washington state has barely even begun to regulate AI, even though it is now touching all aspects of society--education, our workforce, cybersecurity threats, social media and disinformation, our environment (via data centers), etc. As a state, we did nothing for years while other states passed AI regulatory bills; citizens are increasingly anxious about AI's accelerating impacts and risks. Washington is also behind peer states in regulating social media, protecting data privacy, and protecting kids from screens.
Campaign Phone Number
2068199015
Biography (max 750 char)
Gerry Pollet has devoted his career to the public interest as an environmental attorney, organizer, educator and legislator. He’s on the UW School of Public Health faculty and runs the region’s Tribal Environmental Law student training program. Gerry is recognized as one of the Legislature’s leading champions for public education and access to higher education. To make our tax system more fair, Gerry helped pass the Millionaires Tax. He ensured it will INCREASE funding for public education. Gerry wrote the statewide referendum protecting our Columbia River and Treaty rights from the federal government using Hanford as a national nuclear waste dump. Gerry’s been “Legislator of the Year” over 10x for special ed, higher ed & open government.
Funding education is our Paramount Duty. Unless we significantly increase funding, Seattle schools and districts across Washington face massive increases in class sizes, layoffs and school closures. I devote myself day in and day out to ensuring we win that increase for our children’s future.
I was a leader passing the Millionaires Tax to make our tax system more fair and to fund education and health care. I passed the amendment for the Millionaires Tax to INCREASE school funding. I’m working on school funding formulas to ensure we devote new revenues to education programs that improve outcomes.
I Chair the committee doing performance audits of agencies and corporate tax exemptions. I push to pull the plug when programs don’t work and massive corporate tax breaks that do not create jobs.
Our vote by mail elections are the most secure in the nation. Vote by mail / drop boxes increase voter participation, which is great for democracy. I led efforts to place ballot drop boxes closer to people (including college campuses). Our State is defending vote by mail in court. We need to unite our Congressional Delegation to reject the Trump and Congressional Republican efforts to end voting by mail. Rank choice voting improves voters’ sense that their vote matters and increases participation.
I held hearings on audits showing that county officials disproportionately reject signatures of minorities, whose ethnic names aren’t familiar to election workers, and young voters whose signatures change. I’m working to improve validation training and teaching young people to sign in cursive.
If police staffing levels are too low for police officers to respond to crimes, communities won’t be safe. We have nightly gun battles on Aurora Avenue. And Seattle doesn’t have enough police officers to respond while also responding to other crimes across North Seattle. That’s why I supported the $100 million in grants and new tax authority to help cities to both hire officers and support alternative responders for behavioral health and other crises. We need to remove obstacles to trained behavioral health teams to respond to crises.
Safety includes deescalation training. An audit I oversaw documented that, because of political resistance, 86% of police aren’t trained despite state law requiring all trained by 2028. Local agencies should lose state funds if their officers are not trained.
Local journalism is essential for democracy. Saving our vote by mail system won’t matter if we lose our remaining local journalism so people have independent coverage of local and state governments and investigations of actions of local officials.
That’s why I prime sponsored the legislation providing the tax incentive for local news journalism and support grants to fund news reporter fellowships covering local news across Washington.
Journalism is being economically throttled by AI, massive search engines and social media corporations that take local news and feed it while violating copyrights without any payment to the local news outlets that created the news content. I strongly support Washington requiring those corporations to pay for the use of local journalism.
We can’t allow a repeat of the redistricting commission meeting in secret and violating our state’s Open Public Meetings and Public Records Acts as happened in 2021. I’m committed to transparency and participation reforms proposed by open government advocates, including the League of Women Voters.
If legislators who claim to have a “legislative privilege” to keep their records and communications secret participate, we won’t have an open and transparent process That is one of many reasons I lead opposition to claims that legislators have a “privilege” to keep their records and communications secret. We work for you. You have a right to know who we meet with and what we promise them.
Redistricting should ensure that choices of minority communities are not diluted in drawing new districts.
Our great challenge, as across Washington, is our Paramount Duty to provide educational opportunity from early childhood education, K-12 schools and through apprenticeships, workforce training programs or university.
We have an affordability crisis for childcare and a lack of staff. Parents want to ensure that their children have the benefits of quality early learning, not just “care.” That’s why I championed saving Transition to Kindergarten programs and am working to restore funding for Parent Coop Preschools and parent educator faculty at North Seattle College.
I’ve discussed funding for Seattle Schools above. The Trump Administration is gutting our nation’s research universities. As a UW faculty member, I’m working to end state budget practices that continually reduce the UW budget.
