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A symbiotic relationship
In Microsoft’s almost 5 a long time of innovation and invention, our firm’s services and products have basically modified the best way folks across the globe work, study, handle their funds, get hold of well being care, entertain themselves, and conduct different components of day by day life.
Now, as the corporate enters its 50th 12 months, our potential to deliver forth these improvements relies upon extra profoundly on the choices made by elected leaders in Olympia and the native communities of the Puget Sound area than it ever has. Our policymakers’ dedication to creating a powerful and vibrant group – one providing numerous and rewarding job alternatives together with an distinctive high quality of life – gives the inspiration for corporations like Microsoft to succeed.
Being positioned in an space dedicated to innovation, development, and fairness has allowed Microsoft to thrive. In flip, we imagine our success has contributed to the well being of our area and our state.
The just lately adjourned 2024 legislative session is the newest instance of this relationship between group power and company success. Heading into the session, we highlighted state investments in housing, infrastructure, schooling, and clear power that can profit generations to come back. We additionally talked about this being an inflection level, with the state poised to safe its place as the worldwide hub for improvement and accountable use of synthetic intelligence and quantum computing.
Constructing Washington’s future
With this sense of the second in thoughts, and consistent with our dedication to transparency relating to our legislative agenda, we publicly laid out 2024 session priorities in schooling, housing, transportation, clear power, and synthetic intelligence. This was a forward-looking agenda, consisting of balanced public insurance policies to assist construct a brighter future not only for the 50,000 Microsoft workers who name Washington residence, but additionally for each resident of the state.
As we now look again on the 60 days of legislative exercise in Olympia, we see that our priorities aligned with plenty of the problems lawmakers addressed.
Training and skilling
Microsoft helps efforts to considerably improve enrollment in post-secondary credentialing. Latest research estimate that 72% of future jobs – particularly in high-demand fields like know-how and well being care – would require some type of post-secondary credential. However solely 40% of Washington highschool college students earn such a credential by age 26. So, methods to assist extra college students get hold of these crucial credentials are essential to the futures of each the person and the state. We have been, due to this fact, happy to see the passage of SB 5904, which extends eligibility for a wide range of state-supported monetary help applications to as much as six years or 150% of the printed size of a scholar’s program of examine. This extension displays a real-world understanding that a lot of in the present day’s college students are balancing faculty, work and household obligations.
We additionally recognize the funding offered for the IT Academy program and the Washington State Alternative Scholarship (WSOS) within the supplemental price range. The WSOS appropriation, particularly, deserves a couple of extra phrases. State {dollars} characterize matching funds for personal donations to this first-of-its-kind public-private partnership that has offered greater than $150 million in scholarships and different helps to assist 18,000-plus college students from rural, low-income, and numerous populations pursue careers in high-demand fields. WSOS is the right instance of the life-changing impression we are able to have when the private and non-private sectors work collectively.
Housing for all
Microsoft helps insurance policies that meaningfully improve the availability of housing. Whereas the 2024 session didn’t match final 12 months’s “12 months of Housing” within the Legislature, it did produce a number of payments that can transfer our area and state nearer to our mutual aim of making extra housing of all sorts for folks of all earnings ranges. These included the institution of a brand new revolving mortgage fund to help the creation of multi-family housing for low-income working households (HB 1892); legalization of single-occupancy constructing choices for reasonably priced co-living housing (HB 1998); and permitting native governments to supply tax incentives for the conversion of unused business areas to reasonably priced housing (SB 6175). Every of those is a inventive strategy to offering extra housing decisions and provide.
As we stated going into the session, the housing disaster in Washington is just not an issue that appeared in a single day, and it isn’t one which will likely be solved in a single 12 months or perhaps a few years. It should take pressing, concerted and sustained efforts by each the private and non-private sector, and we look ahead to remaining an engaged participant in these efforts.
Microsoft additionally joined with Problem Seattle and different stakeholders to focus extra consideration on the disaster going through emergency departments across the state as they take care of the interrelated challenges of behavioral well being, opioid habit, and homelessness. Our collective efforts helped safe essential investments resembling funding for avenue drugs groups, the institution of around-the-clock, low-barrier stabilization websites, and the enlargement of therapy choices for opioid habit restoration.
Shifting folks and items
Very similar to housing, the 2024 session noticed a number of key choices relating to transportation. The supplemental transportation price range maintained funding for work on the critically essential SR-520 bridge hall mission. This mission is crucial to the continued financial well being of the state, and it’s nearly executed! We significantly recognize lawmakers coming collectively to reaffirm the necessity for its completion.
One other key state appropriation was made for high-speed rail planning, which was essential to obtain essential funding from the Federal Hall Identification and Improvement Program. This mission generally is a game-changer for your complete Cascadia Innovation Hall from Vancouver, B.C. to Portland, and this well timed funding will preserve it shifting ahead.
Like housing, the transportation challenges going through the state are long-standing points that won’t be solved shortly. So, we acknowledge that the 2025 legislative session will once more require a major deal with transportation to deal with funding gaps which have arisen on initiatives within the Transfer Forward Washington package deal from 2022 and to develop the state’s subsequent biennial transportation price range. We look ahead to taking part in and contributing to these deliberations as acceptable.
Clear power
Microsoft helps insurance policies that add agency, clear power to the grid as shortly as potential. Maybe no problem can have as nice an impression in figuring out our future as our potential to deliver extra clear, dependable power sources on-line as shortly as potential. That’s why we proceed to advocate for an “the entire above” strategy that features not solely hydro, photo voltaic, wind, and different power sources historically thought of renewable, but additionally critical evaluation of the potential for nuclear and fusion as sources of protected and ample power. We applaud the passage of the HB 1924 laws to advertise the combination of fusion know-how into Washington’s clear power plan.
Synthetic intelligence
As one of many main corporations creating AI know-how functions, we’re bullish on the potential of AI to positively serve humanity. On the similar time, we acknowledge the dangers related to its misuse and our tasks as a pacesetter on this area. We’re dedicated to working with policymakers right here in Washington and all over the world to restrict the potential misuse of this very important know-how.
We have been happy to see lawmakers acknowledge the necessity to stability these alternatives and dangers and to contemplate what laws may appropriately shield Washington residents whereas nonetheless permitting the kind of innovation that has helped make our area a pacesetter on this and different game-changing applied sciences.
We applaud the Legislature’s choice to create the AI Activity Pressure, requested by Legal professional Normal Ferguson, insofar as it’s going to embody not solely elected officers but additionally representatives of the enterprise group and know-how sector. We stand able to lend our experience, as an organization that has been engaged on these points instantly for plenty of years, to the varied subcommittees that can assist inform the duty power’s deliberations. As we stated earlier than the session convened, Microsoft has been and can stay a pacesetter in advocating for the accountable use of AI.
We stay assured that, working collectively, we are able to harness the facility of AI to create a brand new age of purpose, powered by know-how, led by folks, and fueled by innovation. Completed nicely, synthetic intelligence has huge potential to redefine how know-how serves all of us.
Lastly, thanks
In closing, we once more need to acknowledge the management offered by Gov. Inslee over the course of the previous 12 periods, in addition to the various contributions made by the legislators from each events who’re retiring or working for brand new workplaces. These people – and their colleagues who will stay in workplace – have made lots of the choices which have created an setting for Microsoft, our workers, and our neighbors to thrive.
In a world that’s too usually divided, one factor that may unite us is our shared dedication to making sure that Washington and your complete Pacific Northwest maintains its aggressive financial and cultural place on the world stage, gives equitable job alternatives, and affords a top quality of life for everybody dwelling right here. We are going to proceed to maintain these targets in thoughts as we work with elected officers and different stakeholders within the months and years forward.
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