The King Amp; The Commissioner

[Michele Firmasyah]

Kinghas been serving as acting commissioner since December 2022. He previously served as the chief of staff in the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner from 2021-22, and director of policy, from 2019 to 2021.

Since his appointment as acting health insurance commissioner, Sen. Joshua Miller, the chairman of the Senate Commission on Health & Human Services, said King has "demonstrated his ability" by taking a lead role in a review of Rhode Island's Medicaid reimbursement rates and making the Office of Health Insurance Commissioner "an important health policy and data resource."

Sen. Sam Bell credited King with "regulatory changes that require [Rhode Island's health insurers] to triple their investments in childhood behavioral health. It's one of the most substantive changes we've made in health insurance regulation."

At a gathering this past fall of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Sen. Pam Lauria said, "Rhode Island's Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner and specifically our acting commissioner, Mr. King, was set as a benchmark for the rest of the country to emulate as a way to control the costs associated with health care."

But King ruffled some feathers when he opposed a bill, introduced by Sosnowski, to give the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner an expanded new role in developing, and then phasing, regional parity into the rates Rhode Island's private insurers pay doctors.

As the legislation is written, King warned: "The regional rate parity framework will increase the health insurance premiums paid by individuals and small businesses in Rhode Island. It will also increase the cost of health care paid by self-funded employers, including the municipalities and the state employee health benefit plan."

This would create a cycle of insurers, facing higher provider prices, increasing their premiums to employers, who then pass that cost on to their workers, making health care ultimately more expensive for families, he said.

"Some patients are going over the state border: Yale New Haven in Connecticut, Mass General or Seacoast in Massachusetts, taking Rhode Island health insurance payments with them to out of state hospitals and doctors," she continued. "So, who wins? The health insurers. They make their money wherever Rhode Islanders have to go for health care."

"South County Hospital in South Kingstown has been hurt particularly hard because the Connecticut hospitals are the same travel distance as Providence hospitals for many in South County," said Sosnowski, who represents South Kingstown.

"All this has been going on for 5 years under the watch of Cory King, the acting Health InsuranceCommissioner," she said. "While the cost of commercial health insurance premiums in the state rose from 23% to 28% of median household income."

On January 19, 1914, King and Pierce county commissioners form the Inter-County River Improvement Commission. The commission is charged with carrying out projects on the Puyallup and White rivers to accommodate increased water flow due to the rerouting of the White River from the Duwamish-Green River valley to the Puyallup River valley. The projects include bank strengthening, channel straightening and deepening, and the construction of a debris barrier upriver from the diversion. King County and Pierce County form the commission to resolve the conflict over how the work would be funded. The contract signed by the counties resolves the allocation of financial responsibility for the initial projects and their long-term maintenance. Flooding continues on the rivers, however, and in the 1920s the counties will begin lobbying the federal government to build a dam on the White River to control floodwaters. When Mud Mountain Dam is built in 1948, flooding greatly decreases, but maintenance of the channels downstream from the dam continues today.

Before 1906 the White and the Green rivers draining the foothills of Mount Rainier's northwest flank flowed nearly parallel to each other as they left the upper elevations and emerged into the lower valley. The White carried glacial meltwater from the shoulders of Mount Rainier, and the Green began at the crest of the Cascades, near Stampede Pass.

The two rivers entered the valley, where an alluvial fan built up with sediment from the foothills created the divide between the Puyallup River watershed and the Duwamish-Green River watershed. The White River flowed just along the divide, and in 1906, just south of downtown Auburn at the site of Game Farm Wilderness Park today, it split into two channels. One flowed north and joined the Green River. The other, much smaller branch flowed south, meandered toward the Puyallup River, and was known as the Stuck River. For thousands of years, the White River shifted between the watersheds as its channel meandered across the alluvial fan at the head of the valley. Soil types deposited alongside the rivers indicate that it mostly flowed to the north.

Native communities established winter villages and summer camps along the rivers. Flooding was part of the seasonal round and could be accommodated by locating structures out of reach of most floodwaters. Plants that Native people relied upon were adapted to survive flooding. Additionally, the security provided by relying on a wide variety of plants growing across a wide area combined with a well-developed trade network to protect Native communities from catastrophe when the floods did inundate their homes or plant-gathering sites.

As the non-Native communities centered around Auburn, Sumner, and Puyallup grew in the 1880s and 1890s, settlers farmed the rich soils built up with sediments carried over the lowlands by regular floods. They built homes and towns along the rivers to facilitate transporting their farm produce to downstream populations centers. Marshy lowlands and heavily forested uplands obstructed overland travel by making road construction and maintenance costly and difficult.

The location of permanent housing on the floodplains, a reliance on crops not adapted to flooding, and the existence of a cash economy made the non-Native communities vulnerable to large losses when floods inundated their homes and fields. This happened fairly regularly in the 1890s and 1900s, with a particularly large and destructive flood occurring in November 1906.

The divide between the rivers had been the site of a number of skirmishes between Pierce and King county residents in the years leading up to the 1906 flood. The Stuck River branch was pushed back and forth between the two watersheds by construction of embankments, strategic placement of logs, and other interference. In 1898 the north bluff, which had been undermined by the river's flow, sloughed down into the river and blocked the north channel entirely. The waters eventually found a new route to the north.

The outlook for the rivers and the farmland, and the chances that Pierce and King County would be able to resolve the situation without an agreement, were not promising. In December 1906, several hundred property owners from both river valleys and representatives from transportation companies and chambers of commerce met at Auburn to find a solution for handling the flood waters of both watersheds, which included the White, Duwamish, Stuck, and Puyallup rivers. The attendees voted to form a committee to be chaired by Aaron T. Van De Vanter (1859-1907) of Seattle to explore possible solutions to the problem.

The committee asked Major Hiram T. Chittenden, District Engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, if he would conduct a study of the situation and develop a solution. He agreed, on condition that city engineers from Seattle and Tacoma, county surveyors for Pierce and King counties, the chief engineers from the Northern Pacific, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, the Oregon & Washington railroads, and the Puget Sound Electric Company (which operated the interurban train) would consent to serve on a board of engineers. They all agreed to do so, and the counties and transportation companies funded the endeavor.

In May 1907 Chittenden and his board of engineers delivered their report. It explained, "As an engineering question the answer is a simple one. The distance to the sea by the Duwamish route is about 40 miles; that by the Puyallup is only 20 miles. The slope by the shorter route is much greater than by the longer and the same quantity of water can be carried in a smaller channel. Finally, nature has now transferred the river to the south slope and it will be simpler to perpetuate its work than to change it by artificial means" (Chittenden, 12-13). The report also found that if the river was allowed to remain in the Stuck's channel, it would save 23,000 acres from flooding in the north, while only 9,000 acres would have to be protected in the south.

Chittenden and the engineers laid out a plan for how to protect those acres, but the costs were too high to complete all the work. Also, all the benefit of river rerouting would accrue to King County, while Pierce County would bear all the costs, and state law at that time did not allow counties to expend money outside their borders.

Floods continued to cause damage nearly every year, even with $50,000 worth of work done in 1909 using an appropriation from the state legislature. Finally, in 1913, legislation was passed allowing counties to enter into contracts to address problems that crossed county lines. After some delay as they worked out the agreement, King and Pierce counties on January 19, 1914, signed the contract to form the Inter-County River Improvement Commission. It authorized deepening and straightening the White (formerly Stuck) and Puyallup river channels, riverbank reinforcement, and installation of a drift barrier to capture debris such as logs before they could block the channel downstream.

The agreement also called for the counties to contribute a combined $250,000 per year for six years, with King County paying 60 percent of the total and Pierce County 40 percent, and for the counties to contribute, at the same ratio, $50,000 per year for 25 years for maintenance. Thereafter, the contribution amounts would be determined annually for a period of 74 years.

3a8082e126