Gov. Chris Gregoire, who was supposed to be giving a pre-session talk to capitol reporters in Olympia tomorrow, is somewhere, but not here. She’s cancelled, and is out of state. Her office won’t say where.
This, coming on the heels of Gregoire friend Bill Richardson bowing out of his new gig as Secretary of Commerce, has prompted some interesting speculation about whether Gregoire might be in the other Washington auditioning for a role in the Obama administration.
Fueling the speculation: the fact that Gregoire’s office, which tends to hold its announcements at the capitol-press-friendly times of 10 a.m. or so, plans a major announcement tomorrow at 8 a.m. or earlier. (Hello, D.C….)
The Stranger’s been working overtime on this today. (And here.) But despite its not-safe-for-work ruminations about what type of governor we’d have if Lt. Gov. Brad Owen ascended to the job — “less qualified to be lieutenant governor than an empty bag of chips…a one-eyed dog, and a man without a website” — it sounds like Gregoire’s not going to be moving out of the governor’s mansion anytime soon.
Stay tuned.
Update: In an effort to flush the governor out, The Stranger has started a Where’s-Waldo online poll about where the state’s executive is. Currently leading the voting: “Brokering truce in Seattle hiphop wars from undisclosed location.”
Undeterred by voters’ rejection of his last ballot measure at the polls in November, initiative pitchman Tim Eyman — baby in hand — today filed his “Lower Property Taxes Initiative” for this year.
The measure caps the total revenue from taxes and fees at this year’s level, plus the rate of inflation each year. Any “excess revenues,” say from a future surge in real estate taxes or booming economy, would go into a fund to reduce property taxes the following year. As with Eyman’s earlier property-tax initiative, I-747, voters could override the cap.
“We believe a majority of citizens are going to find it reasonable that governments continue to grow, but that they grow at a rate that we can afford,” Eyman told reporters at the Secretary of State’s office this morning. “When you have 6,7,8 percent increases in our tax burden every year, that compounds every year and it gets exponential to the point that we can’t afford it anymore.”
“Government isn’t getting smaller,” he said. “Even with the initiatives that we’ve passed, government has never gotten smaller. All that we’ve really managed to do is slow down the rate of growth of government.”
The formula in Eyman’s measure, however, doesn’t seem to take into account population growth or other changes, like tough-on-crime laws keeping more people to prison at nearly $30k a year each. (Eyman’s response: that voters can always vote for more if government makes a good case for it.)
Eyman said he expects to start circulating petiitions by February. He and his signature-gatherers will need to collect about 300,000 signatures by July in order to get the measure on the November ballot.
State Rep. Bill Grant, who had been quietly battling lung cancer, has died.
He was 71.
Grant, D-Walla Walla, was a rare Eastern Washington Democrat in the statehouse, and late into the night, his raspy voice would call House Democrats into caucus meetings.
“Bill was one of a kind,” House Speaker Frank Chopp said in a statement sent out a few minutes ago. “He was a man of the land, and he brought his farmer’s values of community, hard work and perseverance to the House of Representatives, where he served for 22 years…I was proud to call Bill my colleague and grateful to call him my friend. He will be deeply missed.”
If you just have to have that novelty cigarette lighter shaped like a rubber ducky, grenade or a certain part of human anatomy, you’d better buy soon.
Washington’s legislative session won’t begin until Jan. 12th, but lawmakers already filed a long list of proposed changes in state law.
Among them: Banning novelty lighters, limiting property taxes, making drivers prove they’re not illegal immigrants, and building a fifth state war memorial to honor casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.
With the state facing a nearly $6 billion budget shortfall, leaders have been urging restraint in the number of bills lawmakers try to pass this year.
The message in a nutshell: “If it costs money, be very careful,” said Melinda McCrady, a spokeswoman for House Democrats.
Still, lawmakers have “pre-filed” more than 100 bills so far, with hundreds more on the way.
Among the proposals so far:
-Novelty lighters: Prompted by calls from fire officials across the country, lawmakers in multiple states want to ban cigarette lighters that don’t look like cigarette lighters. Manufacturers churn out lighters that look like bullets, poker chips, cows, Santa, a toilet and, in at least two variations, a fist-shaped lighter sporting an upraised middle finger. (One of those models speaks every time you spark it up, and you can guess what it says.)
A dozen Washington lawmakers want to ban such lighters, citing cases of children who have been burned or started fires playing with lighters that look like toys. The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission says that about a billion cigarette lighters are sold each year in the United States. Nearly half are imported from China.
-Breathalyzers: Sen. Ken Jacobsen, D-Seattle, wants to give a small tax break to bars that install breathalyzer machines for patrons.
-Continuing a years-long effort, Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, and three other lawmakers have submitted a nearly 400-page bill intended to stamp out gender bias from state law. In hundreds of places throughout the state’s law books, the bill would rewrite references like “he” to “he or she.” “Workman” would become “worker”, “patrolman” would become “patrol officer” and “white men” would become “Europeans.”
-Rep. Mike Armstrong, R-Wenatchee, wants to require applicants for a state driver’s license or identification card to prove that they’re a U.S. citizen or here legally.
-Property taxes: There are several competing proposals for reducing the bite of property taxes. One would require annual assessments, so homeowners aren’t stunned by massive increases every few years. Others would gradually eliminate the state’s share of the property tax or limit increases in assessed value.
-As others have written already, Rep. Armstrong also wants the state to declare Applets and Cotlets candy to be “the official candy of the state of Washington.” Expect resistance from Tacoma natives, who several years ago fought an unsuccessful battle to win the same honor for their local Almond Roca. And Armstrong’s proposal has already drawn fire from the local newspaper in Chehalis, which argues that the local Chehalis Mints – flavored with Eastern Washington mint oil — “would represent the entire state.”
Lots of meetings, apparently. Sixteen times a day.
Here’s the daily to-do list for Jan. 21st, posted by Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown on her blog:
9:00 a.m. Meet with Sen. Jim Kastama and Rep. Hans Dunshee to discuss their scholarship bill
9:30 a.m. Meet with Sen. Mike Hewitt to discuss bond bills and homeless bill
10:00 a.m. Meet with Public School Employees from the 3rd District
10:15 a.m. Meet with Tony Lee, Pam Crone and Kim Justice to discuss the removal of asset limits in public benefit programs
10:45 a.m. Meet with the Washington Student Lobby
11:00 a.m. Meet with Marilyn Watkins of the Family Leave Coalition
11:15 a.m. Meet with the Planned Parenthood Teen Lobby
11:45 a.m. MLK Day Summit and March on Capitol
12:00 p.m. SEIU lobby day lunch
1:00 p.m. Meet with Cathy Mann of Voices and members from Spokane to discuss affordable housing, children and family services issues
1:45 p.m. Meet with Joe Dear and Liz Medizabal of the state Investment Board about legislation to recruit and retain state investment officers
2:00 p.m. Meet with Local 1199 members from the 3rd District
2:15 p.m. Meet with Local 925 members from the 3rd District
2:30 p.m. Meet with staff to discuss next week’s schedule
3:00 p.m. Washington Education Association weekly meeting
3:30 p.m. Meet with Mitch Friedman of Conservation Northwest
4:30 p.m. Meet with Gov. Gregoire
5:00 p.m. Storm Event Work Group meeting to review budget and policy proposals relations to storm damage response, recovery and restoration
Trying to get a weekend story done, so I’ll let others do the talking:
-Joe Turner, on why big tuition hikes at Washington’s state colleges may be in the works,
-Rich Nafziger, on why that would be a bad, bad idea,
-Jim Camden, on how Peter Goldmark is the first Eastern Washingtonian to win statewide office in “…well, a really long time,”
-Jim Camden again, on the looming applets and cotlets battle in Olympia,
-Brad Shannon, on lawmakers who’ve battled cancer,
and, last but not least, Randy Stapilus, declaring that the most influential Washingtonian of 2008 was…Dino Rossi. (Hat tip to Adam Wilson.)
It will be a happier new year, at least for some Washington workers.
Tomorrow, Washington’s minimum wage will rise to $8.55 an hour from $8.07, a full $2 an hour higher than in neighboring Idaho.
“Washington’s is still the highest, followed by Oregon, California and Massachusetts,” said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Labor and Industries.
In Idaho, the minimum wage is the federal $6.55 an hour. That’s slated to rise to $7.25 in July.
Some Washington employers aren’t happy about the 48-cent-an-hour increase. The state’s restaurant association would prefer a lower training wage for 16-year-old workers, or a cap on minimum-wage increases during bad economic times.
“We want to pay fair wages, but we’re facing an industry crisis here,” said spokeswoman Camille St. Onge. Gov. Chris Gregoire and her supporters hammered Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi earlier this year for saying he would support a lower minimum wage for young employees.
Higher wages, St. Onge said, will put a greater squeeze on restaurants already struggling with thin profit margins as worried consumers eat out less. Consumers will likely see higher menu prices, she said.
Washington voters have repeatedly approved a higher state minimum wage, most recently with Initiative 688 in 1998. At the time, the state’s minimum wage was $4.90 an hour.
I-688 passed overwhelmingly, 66 percent to 34 percent. It linked the wage to the federal consumer price index for urban and clerical workers. The index is meant to measure the cost of goods and services needed for day-to-day living, Fischer said. The industries with the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers are food services, retail and agriculture.
Last year, Washington’s minimum wage rose 14 cents, or less than 2 percent. This year’s 48-cent increase is nearly 6 percent.
“As a 63-year-old, that sounds like a lot of money,” said Richard Reed, a retired flooring installer in Chattaroy. “But I know that the disparity between those at the bottom of the income ladder and those at the top has only gotten greater over the years in this country. So in that light, I think that they need it and deserve it.”
In Spokane, advocates for low-income workers are trying to set a local “living wage” for employees of large retailers in the city. The wage would be 130 percent of the state minimum wage, which would work out to about $11.12 an hour in January.
“We’re trying to do a little bit to end the cycle of poverty here,” said Shane Russell, with Spokane’s Peace and Justice Action League. Big-box retailers can afford to pay more, he said, and the impact on consumers would likely be small.
Proponents tried in 2007 to submit enough signatures to put the living-wage plan on a city ballot, but didn’t have enough valid signatures. They’ll try again in 2009, Russell said.
Rep. Steve Hailey, R-Mesa, died Sunday, about a year after he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He would have turned 64 next month.
A farmer and rancher from the Franklin County town of Mesa, Hailey was elected on his second try in 2006, narrowly beating fellow Republican Joe Schmick in the Republican primary. (Schmick, R-Colfax was subsequently appointed to fill a vacant legislative seat, and both men recently won re-election.)
Hailey represented the 9th district, a sprawling triangle that encompasses the Palouse and much of southeastern Washington. The former Vietnam War helicopter pilot made public the cancer diagnosis last January, then went back to his ranch to try to keep working on legislative tasks in between chemotherapy doses.
“This is one of the toughest challenges of my life, but I feel strongly that I have an obligation to be candid about what I’m dealing with and what’s ahead,” Hailey said at the time. He vowed to battle through the disease.
Last spring, he sounded upbeat and energetic, optimistic that the chemotherapy had worked. He was working on the ranch again. He ran for re-election, winning easily. Then, a few weeks after the election, Hailey announced that he’d be resigning Jan. 11th, a day before the legislative session starts. He no longer had the strength, he said at the time, to keep up with a state lawmaker’s workload.
“When Steve announced his resignation earlier this month, we knew it was time for him to focus on his family and his battle against cancer,” said House Minority Leader Richard DeBolt.
Funeral services are slated for 2 p.m. Saturday in Connell, at the Connell Community Center. Republican party officials from the district’s half-dozen counties will nominate appointees for the seat, with the county commissioners making the final decision.
In lieu of flowers, people can make contributions in Hailey’s name to the Tri-Cities Cancer Center Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the Washington Cattlemen’s Association Endowmen Trust Fund.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has declared a state of emergency in Washington due to winter storms.
“Snowfall has reached record or near-record level in 30 of the state’s 39 counties,” Gregoire said in a written statement released Christmas Eve.” With Eastern Washington and other parts of the state still expecting more snow, she said, the proclamation allows the state to respond quickly to local requests for help.
The emergency proclamation covers the cities of Spokane, Spokane Valley and Gig Harbor, as well as the Makah Tribe and King-, Pierce-, Snohomish- and Thurston counties.
Among the things affected: the proclamation temporarily lifts limits on truckers’ hours for hauling milk from dairies. The dairy industry otherwise would have lost nearly $1 million a day from milk that would have been discarded because it was hauled longer than the normal rules allow.
Gregoire’s move also allows her to call out the Washington National Guard to help with storm response, she said.
Continue reading Governor, citing winter storms, declares state of emergency… »
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, a festive Festivus, wonderful Winter Solstice, etc. to all of us.
And may it be a happy new year.
From tomorrow’s paper:
Citing the state’s budget woes, prison officials want to close Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women, Washington’s only women’s prison east of the Cascade Mountains.
As early as next summer, the state would start transferring roughly 350 inmates to a prison near Vancouver. About 140 workers would have to shift to jobs elsewhere or be laid off.
“It was pretty clear that based on the fiscal constraints we’re going to be facing, that we need to close a facility,” said Dick Morgan, director of the state Department of Corrections’ prisons division.
Pine Lodge, located in Medical Lake, includes some aging buildings that need costly renovations, he said, “so it became the most likely candidate.”
The state would save about $14 million over the next two years, he said.
Although state lawmakers will have the final say, Gov. Chris Gregoire has proposed billions of dollars in reduced spending over the next two years, forcing state agencies to find ways to wring that money from their budgets.
Pine Lodge superintendent Walker Morton said he’s urging staff at the minimum custody prison to try not to worry, that it’s just a proposal. If the prison closes, he said, he’s been told it wouldn’t take place until February of 2010.
“We just have to keep our eyes and ears open until the legislators do their thing,” he said.
Morton met with the prison’s inmates Tuesday and told them the news. Most were understanding, he said.
Closing Pine Lodge is only one facet of Gregoire’s proposed $125 million in savings at the Department of Corrections. And the agency isn’t alone; the Department of Social and Health Services is trying to figure out how to cut spending by nearly $1.3 billion; the Department of Health by $75 million.
Morgan said prison officials would be happy to consider money-saving alternatives to closing Pine Lodge. But the state is facing 1,000 fewer inmates than expected, Morgan said, and in the face of a massive budget shortfall, its hard to justify keeping all the prisons open.
News of the proposal, which initially trickled out in phone calls and emails, stunned workers.
“Some people can’t believe this,”said Dawnel Southwick, a secretary supervisor at the prison for the past 9 years. “This facility is not the run-down, broken-down, not-going-to-survive-until-next-week facility that they’re making it out to be.”
“These are good, family-wage jobs,” said Matthew Pederson, executive director of the West Plains chamber of commerce.
The state has two prisons with female inmates in Western Washington. The Washington State Corrections Center for Women is near Gig Harbor, and Mission Creek is near Shelton.
“I’ve never heard of them closing a prison,” said Marye Jorgenson, who works in Pine Lodge’s records department. “You keep up hope that if people fight hard and long enough, we can hang on, hopefully through this recession.”
The Washington Federation of State Employees, which represents most of the workers, said that the state should instead be looking at ways to bring more money into the state treasury.
“I don’t think we can cut our way out of this huge deficit,” said union spokesman Tim Welch. One obvious place to look, he said, are the “huge tax loopholes” for businesses.
For inmates from Eastern Washington, the transfer to Larch Corrections Center would mean being hundreds of miles away from loved ones.
“It’s going to devastate families, and most women in prison have children,” said Nora Callahan, executive director of the November Coalition, a sentencing-reform group based in Colville. “If you move them to where you can’t see them in a day and get home, most people won’t be able to afford to visit.”
Morgan concedes that the move could be tough on Eastern Washington families. But he said most inmates – like most Washingtonians – are from the western side of the state.
The largest state-workers’ union, the Washington Federation of State Employees, filed a lawsuit today against Gov. Chris Gregoire for not including workers’ cost-of-living increases in her budget proposal.
This fall, Gregoire’s office negotiated cost-of-living increases averaging about 2 percent a year for workers over the next two years. But she didn’t include that in her budget plan, released last Thursday.
Gregoire’s budget director, Victor Moore, says that the raises need to be part of the governor’s budget request only if he certifies the contract as “feasible financially” for the state. If Moore says it’s not feasible, he maintains, the governor “is prohibited from submitting a request for funds to the Legislature.” (Here’s a link to a copy of the letter, in this blog post by the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Joe Turner.)
Moore says that the contracts, finalized in August and September, “were concluded prior to the global financial market crisis we all witnessed in October.” The state’s November revenue forecast, which predicted $1.9 billion less in revenues than projected just two months earlier, hurt the state’s financial plans dramatically. Paying for the raises, Moore writes, would mean even deeper cuts to the social safety net.
The lawsuit asks a Thurston County judge to “compel” the governor to submit the pay raises and the other economic parts of five negotiated contracts to state lawmakers. The agreements cover 30,000 government employees and another 10,000 at a dozen community colleges and some four-year schools.
“Both parties agreed to the terms of that agreement, with the express or implied understanding that by this agreement, the director of OFM was committing to certify that the contractual commitments were financially feasible for the state,” the lawsuit says.
“Compact snow and ice” is a familiar cautionary refrain to winter drivers, but in Seattle, it’s apparently what city road crews are striving for.
The Seattle Times has a story about this today, quoting a city transportation official as saying that the goal in hilly Seattle is “a hard-packed surface” of snow and ice. From the story:
The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.
“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”
No word on whether auto-body shops are viewing this as an economic stimulus plan.
As my son rejoices at the closure of school for the day, I am thinking about the people in the homeless shelters and using food banks, and the families who created the longest line ever for the Christmas Bureau sponsored annually by the Spokesman-Review.
So begins a recent blog post by Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, who’s clearly worried about what the $5.7 billion (or more) budget shortfall will mean to struggling people and families.
Brown was muted in her criticism yesterday of Gov. Chris Gregoire’s all-cuts budget proposal for the next two years. Among those cuts: eliminating adult day health programs that help senior citizens and disabled adults remain in their homes, doing away with $339-a-month checks and health coverage of thousands of people deemed “unemployable” due to mental or physical problems, and a 42 percent cut in state-subsidized health coverage for the working poor.
But the former Senate budget writer also implies that a budget written by the Senate will look a lot different. Brown writes:
I respect the principle behind the Governor’s admonition to the legislature (prompted by press inquiries about alternatives to an all-cuts budget) that “we’ve got to live within our means”. But something sticks in my throat when I think about the contrast between the high-flying corporate executives and the mentally and physically challenged people living one step up from the streets on GA-U. How do they live within their means if we completely eliminate them?
Gov. Chris Gregoire’s budget plan doesn’t include the money to pay for an initiative approved by voters just last month. I-1029 — like the governor herself — was heavily supported by members of the Service Employees International Union.
Here are the details, from the TNT’s Joe Turner.
Washington Federation of State Employees president Carol Dotlich had some words of advice for fellow union members at a recent banquet in Spokane:
“When you see that budget, I don’t want you to overreact to it,” she reportedly told the crowd. “I don’t want you to be panicked. I want you to be determined.”
The 40,000-member union is trying to stave off some of the cuts proposed yesterday by Gov. Chris Gregoire, including suspending all cost-of-living increases for state employees.
Some members are also heeding Gregoire’s call to not just say “don’t cut”, but to instead say “cut this other thing instead.”
For some members at the state Department of Ecology, that meant filing a public disclosure request for the salaries, bonuses and other pay given to the agency’s managers over the past 8 years. They found that rank-and-file workers got pay raises totalling about 28 percent, while managers’ totaled nearly 42 percent.
The union’s executive director, Greg Devereux, is calling for management bonuses to be eliminated.
Hat tip: The Olympian’s Adam Wilson.
From the print paper:
Think back to the last time you renewed your driver’s license. Do you remember the shoes on the person behind the counter?
Of course not. But you probably paid for them. Taxpayers provide a $97-a-year “shoe allowance” for the 330 folks working at the state’s 60-plus driver licensing offices. You also pick up the tab for the employees’ shirts, pants, sweaters, jackets and hats, as well as a $27-a-month stipend for dry cleaning.
With Washington’s government facing a $5 billion to $6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years, residents are trying to find new ways to save. Doing away with the clothing allowance was among the nearly 2,000 ideas submitted over the past few weeks to Gov. Chris Gregoire, who recently release a budget proposal including deep spending cuts.
“We looked at all the suggestions and had them in mind as we were making decisions” on that proposal, said Glenn Kuper, a spokesman for the governor’s budget office. Many of the ideas, he said, could also be wrapped into a broader package of government reforms Gregoire plans to propose in January.
Continue reading Budget-crisis suggestions, from insiders and the hinterlands… »
As newspapers shrink staff, the number of reporters covering state government has shrunk dramatically, both across the nation and here in Olympia. We joke that soon the only one watching government will be the robotic cameras of TVW, the state’s public affairs network. And no one laughs very hard.
The Seattle Times’ Andrew Garber chronicled the growing emptiness at the press desks on the House and Senate floor.
In 1993, there were 34 journalists covering the Washington state Legislature. By 2007, there were 17. This year, there may be as few as 10 full-time journalists, mostly newspaper reporters.
and this:
The Associated Press office at the state Capitol keeps a printout with mugshots of reporters who recently covered the Legislature pinned to a wall. They mark off each reporter who leaves. Seven faces are now covered with smiley-face stickers.
The public-relations staff employed by state lawmakers and government agencies, many of whom are former journalists, vastly outnumber the reporters in Olympia who call them for information.
Some political bloggers are trying to fill that gap. Horse’s Ass blogger David Goldstein is thinking of dispatching one of his political writers, Josh Feit, to cover Olympia’s legislative session. Writes Goldstein:
The problem, of course, is the money. It’ll cost HA about $15,000 in salary and expenses to pay Josh to cover this four month session… and that’s on top of the money I ultimately need to raise to support myself. And I’d like to hear from you, my readers, whether you think it is worth it?
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