In times of drought, city people are often encouraged to limit their water use: Wash cars less often, water lawns less regularly. Nothing wrong with that, but such advice tends to cloak the really heavy users 0f water in the non-coastal west: agricultural irrigators. In most states west of the 100th meridian, excepting the Pacific coastal area, anywhere from 80% to 90% of water used by people is used by farmers.

In places like Idaho, where water is monitored closely, the people much involved with water – notably the policy makers and water users – tend to be well aware of that, and it’s lodged into practical thinking on the subject. Time may be coming, though, when thinking on the subject is due for a shift. Urban growth in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas has started to crimp water use in the southwest. And now come early signs some of the same could be happening in the Snake River basin in Idaho.

The trigger for some rethinking was the battle, over the last few months, between Idaho Power Company on one side and the state government and many water users on the other. Iddaho Power maintained that it is feeling increasing pressure as it tries to keep its power rates low in a time of growth; its traditional means of doing that is through its hydropower dams, which provide some of the least expensive juice. Its demands for water rank head first into the needs of many southern Idaho irrigators, among others.

A deal, for now, was reached on that situation several weeks ago; it calls for irrigators to pay a substantial part of the increased cost that higher power demands have imposed on Idaho Power. But a disquieting note appears in comments from Lynn Tominaga, a former state senator and now executive director of the Idaho Irrigation Pumpers Association.

Irrigators have been held to account for many of Idaho Power’s increased costs and pressures. But Tominaga makes a solid point: “Do you see new irrigated land coming into production?”

He’s right: It hasn’t. And while a singe house uses relatively little water, the great mass of houses doing up especially around southwest Idaho – estimated at upwards of 10,000 a year over the last decade – has really added to the pressure on water supplies.

Rural legislators slowly are losing their traditional clout in the Idaho Legislature. But they may see the structuring of Idaho’s water, electricity and rate system as a point to center in on when they reconvene in 2007.

What exactly is one state legislator in Washington doing interfering in the communications of another with his constituents?

In essence, that’s happening in Washington, through the intermediary of legislative staff.

All this grows out of a principle, enshrined in rules in various ways in many states, that legislators should refrain from personal attacks on each other. That makes some sense; start down that road and cooperative legislating soon becomes impossible. The imperative is to stick to the issues.

But that principle usually applies to speech and statements in official proceedings, on the floor and in committee. And ordinarily, it doesn’t serve to limit lawmakers from saying what they want about substantive matters, or characterizing them as they will. Especially to constituents.

Enter a Washington legislative rule from 1998, which had bipartisan support, which said that attacks by legislators on other legislators should not be supported with state money, in whatever means. Here it starts to get tricky, because you wind up with bad cases like the one Representative Glenn Anderson, a Republican from Falls City, is contending with.

Like many other legislators, he sends his constituents newsletters. The House clerk’s office has taken to editing these, to the point of insisting of what he can and cannot say about issues – because some of what he says about some issues could be taken as criticism of majority Democrats. Continue Reading »

Emotion spilled all over the floor of the Oregon Senate toward the end of Thursday’s brief special session. That will happen when the subject is child sex abuse.

The emotion came in part from Senator Bruce Starr, a Hillsoboro Republican, who had pushed a very similar measure in the 2005 session. “Jessica’s Law” – another of those measures named for a victim of a horrific crime – is relatively narrow, and easily gets widespread support. It applies to adults who sexually molest children under 12, and requires both a 25-year sentence and lifetime monitoring, since so many such offenders are compulsive re-offenders.

House Bill 3507 passed the House in 2005 and quickly got the support of most senators, but became snared in the Senate-House cross-battles over legislation, and died at session’s end. Hardly anyone felt good about that, and when Governor Ted Kulongoski ordered up a special session, Senate President Peter Courtney pushed through inclusion of Jessica’s.

In the meantime, it had become the subject of a major initiative campaign which seemed likely to get it on the ballot and to pass it; Starr was much involved with that as well. And he talked at length Thursday, sometimes in circular fashion. But he sounded a grateful note Thursday – he might have understandably felt undercut at this point – as the proposal approached its final passage (30-0) in the Senate.

A rather different note came from another bill supporter, Eugene Democrat Vicki Walker.

Her story was personal. She started out withthe blunt statement, “I was raped when I was five years old,” and went on from there through experiences that went on more than a decade. She warned that most child sex abusers are family, neighbors or friends of the family, and cited personal experience to back that up.

You could see the senators squirming as they listened (she acknowledged the discomfort in the room as she was speaking), but the unease came not only from her personal story, harrowing as it was, but also from her legislative point: That crafting legislation which reaches into families, which aims at holding families together while also protecting children, is a tough thing to do. She and other senators are at work on it, she noted, and noted as well that the effort has drawn concern from a range of quarters. And that battle, she suggested, hasn’t even properly begun.

“I’m sorry this offended some of your sensibilities,” she said near the end. That sounded almost like a warning: If she’s re-elected and back in the chamber in January, that offense may continue.

The 2005 Oregon legislative session left a lot of Oregonians feeling sour on Salem. It failed to address a string of issues and failed to pass a clutch of ideas that had widespread support. And the governor, Ted Kulongoski, seemed to be painfully detached from the proceedings (a contrast to his Washington counterpart, Christine Gregoire, who brokered several big legislative deals that same year).

On Thursday, in just under six hours – one of the shortest if not the shortest special sessions on record in Oregon – both legislature and governor may have done a lot to repair their reputations.

Remember: This was no slam dunk. There were plenty of calls for Kulongoski to call the session, but doing it entailed risk. Special sessions have a way of either blowing up or of just behaving poorly. As this one ended, Senate President Peter Courtney reflected on how in his long legislative career he’d been through 16 (of the total 36) special sessions, and didn’t think well of most. One, he recalled, lasted 32 days. In general, he said, when he took over the job as president of the Senate, the thing he dreaded most was heading into a special session.

There are reasons for that. As he pointed out, legislators who go to a special are there for a few specific topics mostly not of their making. They have no committee meetings (or few of them) to go to, and little to do. They’re being asked to serve almost as rubber stamps. The usual circumstances are not propitious.

The preparation for this one was solid, however, and cooperation seemed to be close to universal. Having called the session, and in a year looking ever more perilous for him politically, Kulongoski involved himself quite directly in this one. Both Courtney and House Speaker Karen Minnis apparently got into it as thoroughly, both with agendas of their own, including the payday loan regulation on Minnis’ part and Jessica’s law on Courtney’s. for the space of one day, everyone seemed to take a deep breath and say, “okay, let’s do this.” Continue Reading »

Protests sometimes change minds in the direction intended; sometimes they backlash. The suddeness, the size and the intensity of the recent wave of immigration protests – structured so as to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants – is certainly having effect, but much of it seems to be in the form of angry reaction.

Our speculation is that this accounts for much of the sudden jump in the campaign revenues of Idaho 1st District representative candidate Robert Vasquez, a Canyon County commissioner who has made immigration his pre-eminent issue (as it has been, for him, for many years). He is fiercly anti-immigrant, his own family’s history notwithstanding, and has spoken of an “invasion,” and has described Senator Larry Craig for his support of guest worker-type legislation. A few months ago, Vasquez was getting limited traction. Now, he seems to be building steam.

Over in Idaho Falls, far from Vasquez’ 1st district, resident Henry Morton writes today in the Post Register (no free link available), “What we do not need are the illegals who threaten us with economic terrorism if they do not continue to get the right to lie, steal, cheat and fraudulently acquire U.S. citizen benefits while paid-for bagmen like Craig stiff the U.S. citizen with more costs that leave their families with less. This is because the weak, incompetent, maligning politically correct types in Congress think everyone in the world comes before U.S. citizens.”

Mind: We’re not endorsing that viewpoint; there’s more than a kernel of simple-minded “blame the other tribe” in it. But if you’re looking for traction, you may find it there, alongside the idea of people like Larry Craig being abruptly thrown into the unholy category of the “politically correct.”

Among notable social indicators, the consumption of booze is right up there as a benchmark of all sorts of things. So this caught our eye out of the Yakima Herald-Republic:

“The state Liquor Control Board plans to close its Yakima enforcement office this summer, citing low usage and the movement of business to the Internet. One of two existing Yakima-based enforcement officers will work from home, or a small office. The other will be based in the existing Kennewick office, according to Bob Burdick, Olympia-based spokesman for the agency.”

We haven’t seen similar notices for other areas, and no very visible word on this from the liquor board itself.

Is it that people aren’t drinking so much anymore in the Yakima country?

Not really: Tell it to the list of applicants for a liquor license in just the city of Yakima: 13 in that community alone.

But it could be indicative of changes in business patterns – the way liquor moves around, always an interesting topic. We will revisit.

We’re at about one year ahead of the opening of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge (or couplet, as it might almost better be called), and this bit of information probably was best delivered well in advance. A lot of Pierce Countians will need some time to digest it.

That is the price of the toll people will be expected to pay to travel on the bridge: $3, evidently in both directions. But not to worry: The state has a new program, called Good to Go, which lets drivers prepay their tolls, in amounts of $30 and up. The state’s description:

“If you are a Good To Go! customer, stay in the Good To Go! express lanes (1) and drive through the toll zone without stopping. The overhead antenna (2) reads your Good To Go! account information and automatically debits the correct toll from your prepaid account. Violators who use the express lanes without paying will be fined – a camera (3) takes a picture of the license plate and a citation is mailed. Cash Customer – If you decide to pay your tolls with cash, you must use the ‘Cash Only’ lanes (4) and stop at the toll plaza. Pay the toll to one of our friendly toll attendants with cash or a credit card (5). When you see the green light (6) you may proceed.”

And the state really hopes people get into the prepay mode, as the Tacoma News-Tribune noted: “The new $849 million bridge will increase Highway 16’s capacity, but unless enough people participate in the electronic system, traffic engineers say, cars will back up behind the tollbooths as people fumble for change.”

One of the glories of this country long has been the free or very low-cost access to roads – to travel freely. Yes, of course, the bridge was both necessary and awfully expensive (now estimated at $849 million). But that $3 fee seems like a real bar to transportation, and you wonder whether there won’t be some revolt, maybe in the form of diminished traffic, against it.

You suspect there are a lot of people in Gig Harbor and Port Orchard who will become abruptly less likely to take a spontaneous shopping trip over to Tacoma or Seattle. it might do some some good for public transit, though – this could be a real incentive for many people to move in that direction. As for daily driving commuters (no break is expected for them): it’s about to get more costly.

When King County Executive Ron Sims announced his proposal for a tax increase to ramp up the volume on public transit, he remarked that “Transit Now [his proposal] will give people what they are asking for: more bus service more frequently.” That poses a question: Which people were doing the asking?

This space has long contended that one of the key reasons public transit systems fail, or fail to reach anything resembling their potential, is weak service: There are too few routes, they are operated too erratically, you have to wait forever to get a bus or train, and you likely will need to engage in a complicated series of switches if you make everything else work. The key to solving this is frequency, intensiveness of routes, and reliability. That, of course, is costly, but probably the only way to make such a system work. (It is a key, for example, to the Portland area’s excellent Tri-Met system.)

The people who actually ride public transit tend to know all this, and they most likely were the core of the group Sims was referring to. From the county’s description of the plan:

Transit Now will expand Metro service by up to 20 percent systemwide over the next 10 years, and get more commuters on the bus and off the road now by launching the expansion within months of a final decision, not years. As much as 700,000 new annual service hours – or about 200 additional buses – will be on the road by 2015. More than a half million people will be within walking distance of the new service.

The initiative will bring Bus Rapid Transit service to five of the most congested travel corridors in King County with buses at 10-minute intervals. Regular service on existing high-ridership routes will also be expanded to 15-minute intervals all day cutting the wait time for thousands of passengers, plus new service will be added to serve residents in rapidly growing neighborhoods.

It would be paid for by adding a tenth of a cent to the county’s sales tax – raising about $50 million, costing – Sims estimated – the average household about $25 a year. Continue Reading »

All the campaigns in Idaho’s 1st congressional district contest have reported new numbers, and the net result is to make the contest look less scrutable than ever.

Front-runner status in money and, probably, organization as well remains Bill Sali, whose late-session Statehouse blowups probably did him no harm with the core of the 1st district electorate. That said, the new fundraising total, $290,202, ranks as less impressive than some of the heavy leads he had been racking up: His fundraising in the first quarter of this year was a lot less striking than it was in 2005. Is that a signal of impending weakness? Or just as a sense that in his sort of campaign, he’s already raised enough: Either it’s enough to win, or raising more wouldn’t have been enough to help. Sali isn’t really a broadband candidate anyway; he’s narrowcasting to a specific crowd. He still has more cash on hand than anyone else in the race.

But others are coming on, to a greater degree, as well. Continue Reading »

There is a certain phrase that may forever be associated with Vice President Dick Cheney, that writers about him cannot void. The Everett Herald‘s reporter did not resist on occasion of the vice presidential visit to Snohomish County:

“Vice President Dick Cheney arrived Sunday evening at Paine Field, where he was greeted by area Republican leaders before stepping into a limousine and heading to an undisclosed location for the rest of his Easter.”

Yes, his location was largely undisclosed during much of his visit to Washington last weekend. But there’s a point in that.

Cheney came to raise money for 2nd U.S. House candidate Republican Doug Roulstone, opposing Democrat Rick Larsen. Mission accomplished: He raised the money, which will no doubt be highly appreciated by Roulstone’s uphill campaign. But the fundraising was just about all. For a vice presidential visit, it was a sturdily low-key matter.

This wasn’t a matter of parading around in public, at least any more than necessary, as a means of boosting the local Republican candidates – or support for the Bush Administration. This was a case of recignition that while Cheney may be a strong draw as a fundraiser, that his popularity overall is so weak that greater visibility might be a serious detriment.

At least, what part of his visit proved that proposition wrong?

An important column by Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times today, on the wildly increasing prices of houses in the Seattle area. If the column’s implications were only about Seattle, it would be of somewhat less importance; but you could substitute “Portland” or many other communities around the region and across the country and come to the same thing. He asked many of the important questions, but we’re addressing this here because he left one out.

His point is that housing in Seattle has become super-expensive. He recounts how, barely a decade ago, he bought his first home, a “fixer” but a decently-sized place, for $93,000, toward the upper limit of what he could then afford as a reporter for the Seattle Times (which pays pretty well, for the newspaper industry; its reporters are solidly paid professionals). He notes that buying something even remotely similar now would run at least $200,000, more likely at least $250,000. A decently modern and spacious house in the Seattle area – not just city limits, but for quite a few miles around – starts at upwards of $300,000. The average home sale now is closer to $400,000.

Westneat’s immediate point is that the Seattle area is rapidly pricing its working class out of home ownership – even out of residency. No doubt he’s right. And that has many implications.

The puzzler we wonder about on top of that, however, is: Where are all these people coming from who can afford $400,000 homes? Wages haven’t risen anywhere near those levels in recent years; the number of wealthy in our society is hardly so great that a city the size of Seattle can populate itself entirely with the rich. From where is all this money coming from? Or – ominously – can these people really afford it at all? And if they can’t, what will that mean a few years down the line?

Asurprising reality check in the Portland Oregonian noting that a piece of conventional wisdom – that Oregon has some of the highest taxes on business in the west – is simply wrong.

From the story: “Despite election-year rhetoric that businesses are overtaxed, no state asks businesses to pay a lighter share of its state budget than Oregon does, according to the Council on State Taxation, which represents big business,” the paper noted. It went on well beyond organizational anlayses to do its own, noting that individual Oregon taxpayers may several times as much per taxable dollar as do businesses.

As to the Council on State Taxation . . . let’s pause a moment. It describes itself as “a nonprofit trade association consisting of approximately 570 multistate corporations engaged in interstate and international business.” Its credentials as a reasonable judge of which entities charge business comparatively more or less seem solid. In one study, it compares the corporate income tax rates of the states. Oregon’s is 6.6% (just over two-thirds the rate for individuals); in super pro-business Idaho the rate is 7.6%, in California 8.8%, in super-fast growing Arizona, 7%. (Washington, of course, lacks an income tax but does have a business tax which makes up for it.)

The Oregonian piece amply deserves to throw twist in a run of fast-charging political rhetoric this year. And not only in Oregon.

No opposition here to the idea, offered Wednesday by the (Oregon) Public Commission on the Legislature, that Oregon’s lawmakers start meeting every year instead of every other year. Oregon is overdue for that change.

It did a nice job too in suggesting the next term as a period of experimentation, allowing for trying out the idea before recommending to the voters that it be locked in place via constitutional amendment.

One of its ideas would put Oregon’s legislature on a vastly different track than most others, which around the country almost all begin annually in January or February. The commission’s proposal would call for a start in early April. Which might not be a bad idea, but certainly needs some review.

As the commission and legislature run down this road, it may want to consider the pluses and minuses of the annual legislature experience in two neighboring states, Washington and Idaho. Continue Reading »

And sometimes a news story doesn’t really carry any larger freight, but it becomes so overwhelming that some sort of commentary becomes necessary anyway. The scandal surrounding Portland’s former police chief, Derrick Foxworth, has little intrinsic importance: It looks like another case of an overenergetic executive doing something stupid, and getting caught at it, and proobably paying the price. (He’s technically still on paid leave, but the pretense probably will not last long.)

The basics, for those outside the Portland metro area (practially all those inside already know), mainly concern Foxworth’s relationship with Angela Oswalt, a civilian employed in the Portland Police Bureau and at times under Foxworth’s supervision, and which now has led to a lawsuit filed by her against the city. The two agree they had an “intense” relationship a few years before he was named chief; they disagree about a number of details. She has produced a volume of e-mails and recounted other conversations with Foxworth, in fine-grain technicolor. Much of this has made the rounds around Portland, especially in its cop shops. The e-mail (whose provenance evidently hasn’t been nailed yet) in which Foxworth writes about his “hot chocolate body” apparently has been a favorite. Odwalt also has said that she has felt threatened by Foxworth.

That, and the fallout (Foxworth is on leave, but his “interim” replacement started her first day acting like a permanent replacement), is basically the whole story. Except for the meta-story. Continue Reading »

This appears not to have hit the wires yet in Oregon, though it has in Arizona: The Associated Press is reporting that Republican State Representative Jeff Kropf
(rural Marion and Linn Counties) isn’t just taking a policy position on immigration.

He’s aiming to do some enforcing – according to the report, “flying his own plane on patrols along the border.”

The report said that “Kropf, a grass seed farmer and host of a weekend radio talk show in Portland, arrived in Arizona on Monday. He says he didn’t time his trip as a counterprotest to the demonstrations against tougher immigration policies. He says he’s just passionate about immigration because of the impact on jobs, national security, drug policy and disease control.”

His campaign website doesn’t make mention of his Arizona trip (where a variety of topics were opinionated on, but immigration didn’t seem to show up). Nor was there anything evident on the KXL web site. As they say, developing . . .