You might think that a big warning sign might have been posted, in letters too large and obvious to ignore, somewhere in the Washington Senate Republican caucus, a clear message: Don’t give the Democrats social-issue raw meat. Stick to taxes and budgets; leave the rest for another day.

But no. Here’s the text (all but a link) of what may be the Senate Democrats’ last press release of the session: “With literally hours left in the 2013 session, and virtually nothing to show for more than 100 days of work, 11 Republicans have decided their time would be best spent rolling back civil rights.”

The measure in question is Senate Bill 5927, and has to do with civil rights. Here is how one Democrat, Senator Kevin Ranker, described it: “if you own a business in our state and don’t like gay people because of religious beliefs, philosophical beliefs or just because you don’t, you will no longer have to provide services or sell your goods to any gay people. How’s that for progress? This of course all stems from the case of a florist in Richland who decided to not provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding. Providing legal protection for this kind of bigotry takes us back to the days before Martin Luther King Jr., and attempts to reopen an issue that has been settled history in this country for decades.”

You will be hearing about all the way through 2014, as the parties battle for more outright control of the Washington Legislature.

Northwest Reading

When a party takes over a legislative chamber, especially by a modest margin, the incentive ought to be to play it cautiously, stay relatively moderate, and not overstep. That’s even more the case if you’re in the position the Washington Senate Republicans hold today: In effective control of the chamber (with crossover help from two conservative Democrats), even though the voters didn’t give them a majority at the ballot. Stepping carefully, and cooperating with the opposition, would seem to be in order.

How that may happen is suggested by an April 17 press release from Democratic Senator Nick Harper, which seems to outline clearly Democratic talking points next year:

Sen. Nick Harper, D-Everett, released the below statement following Wednesday’s cutoff to consider bills from the opposite chamber.

“When the Republicans took control of the Senate, they said their style of governing would be one of ‘policy over politics.’

“Four months later, their policies have proven to be purely political.

“They have operated in lockstep with the National Republican agenda, rolling back rights of working families, denying women access to reproductive choices, preventing aspiring Americans education options and doing absolutely nothing to prevent gun violence, most recently refusing to vote on HB 1840, which would have helped protect victims of domestic violence from gun violence.

“This bill passed the House with bipartisan support and was further amended in the Senate to address concerns raised by organizations such as the NRA. This is a yet another piece of common sense firearm legislation left to rot on the vine by the Republican majority.

“Their values are not the values of the majority of Washingtonians and they have demonstrated that every misstep of the way.

“This ‘Coalition’ of 23 Republicans and two ‘Democrats’ is firmly in the hands of a few far-right ideologues who have threatened to walk should any legislation that doesn’t line up with their FOX News-view of the world advance to the Senate floor.

“One session after seizing control, Washington state has at best been stuck in neutral and at worst been thrown in reverse.”

RANDY STAPILUS   West of the Cascades

A broad take on Jay Inslee, in the few months since he was elected and then sworn in as Washington’s governor, has been that he’s full of smiles and intentions of working with everybody, but that there’s not been a lot of coming down clearly on policy, one way or another.

That ended today, as these things often do, with numbers.

His proposed budget calls for $1.2 billion in targeted education increases, among other things. His thematic statement was that “I feel deeply that my number one priority is to help rebuild our economy, get people working again, and take important steps toward building a workforce for the future. And that begins with education.”

Also begins with spending more than Republicans would like, and that’s notably important among the Republicans who now control the Senate.

From Inslee’s press release: “Inslee has said repeatedly that the state cannot fund its basic education obligations by making deeper cuts to vital services for children, seniors and vulnerable adults. Instead, the Governor proposes closing tax breaks and extending tax rates set to expire June 30 — a 0.3 percent business and occupation tax surcharge paid by doctors, lawyers, accountants and others and a 50-cent-per gallon beer tax.”

That sets out with some clarity what he wants to do. It also marks out the battleground for the remainder of the session – or, if he holds to his determination (he and the House Democrats), however many subsequent special sessions lie in wait.

This has become a battle of wills. If Inslee’s approach has been to build up political chits till now, he’s reached the point where spending them will become necessary.

Washington’s legislative session is about to get a lot more interesting: The sides have now begun to fully collide.

The Washington Supreme Court has struck down a requirement for a two-thirds vote in the legislature to raise taxes. The court, in a 6-3 vote, said the state would have to pass a constitutional amendment to change from a simple majority to a supermajority.

While Washington voters have repeatedly approved the two-thirds requirement, it’s nice to know that at least six people in high places have brought some sanity to a tax system that was already a mess. Score in year 2013: Washington’s future, 1. Tim Eyman, 0. – Tom Menzel

TOM MENZEL   Washington My Home

FOR SALE, LEASE OR TRADE: 120,000 acres of prime Washington real estate. Valued at more than $3 billion. Includes 116 parks, 700 historic buildings, cabins, yurts, vacation houses, forts, fabulous wedding venues, and dozens of stunning beaches. Buy now and get naming rights for hokey park names like Cape Disappointment, Steamboat Rock, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. Contact Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission or your local state legislator.

Pardon the hyperbole, but this scenario may not be too far off since our parks have become nothing but financial burdens that need to be monetized. After the legislature voted in 2011 to cut off all general fund support for our state parks and replace it with user-fees (“earned income”), the State Parks and Recreation Commission has been scrambling to keep them open and operating while continuing to make its case for stable funding sources.

Unfortunately, the latest desperate attempts to shore up lost revenue – a $30 annual “Discover Pass” and a $10 day-use fee – have fallen 50 percent short of projections. So now we have a critical funding crisis, yet one more chapter in the ridiculous quest to run government like a business. As state parks director Don Hoch said last summer: “At no time in our 100-year history have we been in a position like this, where we have to make so many tough decisions.”

Palouse Falls State Park (photo/state of Washington)

A report to the Parks and Recreation Commission last August says that no other state follows such a self-funded model, calling it “impractical” and “unachievable.” So now we have a rare opportunity to lead the way to the bottom in park management. The visionary generations who came before us are rolling over in their graves.

Ironically, the legislature’s target for defunding our parks is this year, 2013, which happens to be the 100th anniversary of our state park system. Many of the noble and ambitious plans to upgrade, expand and improve the parks for the centennial celebration have been shelved. State Parks has already made painful staff and spending reductions and has been planning for “previously unthinkable reductions.”

In the very year when we should be bursting with pride to celebrate these crown jewels, we are casting this loyal old dog out into the cold without food or shelter – sort of like filing for divorce on your 50th anniversary party. And we now have a draft of the divorce papers in the form of a report released January 29th by the Parks and Recreation Commission. It’s called “Transformation Strategy – Adapting to a new way of operating Washington’s state parks.”

This is not a fun read unless you like hearing about good people begging for help. I can imagine the seven volunteer commissioners weeping as they sat through countless McKinseyesque workshops and public meetings and finally forcing themselves to approve this document. They are doing the best they can. They are doing what they have to do.

But the 27-page report reads like notes from a corporate retreat. It uses the word “business” 20 times. “Lease” shows up 13 times. It includes buzzwords straight from Dilbert, like: forming strategic partnerships; strategies and initiatives to help create a new business model; transformation principles with imperatives that will drive agency-wide planning, resource allocation and day-to-day decisions; core values and cultural norms that promote organizational change and innovation; specific action-oriented initiatives that will advance agency transformation. And, my favorite, it boldly encourages a decimated park staff to embrace risk-taking, accepting responsibility for the outcome and “excellence in all we do.”

The report even sheepishly admits a dark secret: “For many years parks and recreation providers believed that technology had no place in parks. Even commissioners and staff believed state parks should remain technology-free.” Imagine that. Continue Reading »

image/courtesy, Seattle Public Library

 
So, last week the Infallible Gallup Organization revealed that Oregon is a teeny bit more liberal than Washington. This week that bastion of “institutional research and assessment” – Central Connecticut State University – found that Seattle is the nation’s second “most literate city,” while Portland – home of the eighth wonder of the world, “Powell’s City of Books” – straggled in at No. 10.

At least they beat San Francisco this year.

The Other Washington came in No. 1 in 2012, while Minneapolis took the third spot. Over the last eight years, Seattle’s been duking it out for the top spot with Minneapolis and DC, with Seattle perched on top four times. Portland has ranged from ninth to twelfth since 2005, except for a sixth-place blip in 2009, when something suddenly sent Portlandians into a reading frenzy.

Boise didn’t quite make the population cutoff of 250,000, but we’re sure the City of Trees would be up there somewhere. The study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: number of bookstores, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, periodical publishing resources, and newspaper circulation.

Check it out all you data junkies: http://www.ccsu.edu/page.cfm?p=15619. – Tom Menzel

BILL OF THE DAY

Periodic testing (which can include things like pop quizzes) with the idea of finding out if the students are learning is a sound idea. Revolving public education around a series of high-stakes tests is simply madness.

Pushback against that approach (which had the intent of providing “accountability” but instead perverts the system) seems to have been growing, and in Washington it’s gotten visible – to the point that the revolt has generated legislation which has the support of the state Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The measure is House Bill 1450, proposed by Representatives Sam Hunt, D-Olympia, and Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, which “Declares an intent to: (1) Begin administering the college-ready and career-ready assessments that are being developed to measure the common core state standards in the
2014-2015 school year; (2) Combine the current reading and writing assessments into English language arts assessments; (3) Reduce the number of different assessments that will be required for students to graduate beginning with the class of 2015; and (4) Decentralize the scoring of the collections of evidence.”

The five-into-three reduction is what will get attention out that (those other parts do have some interest too).

And what does the state’s top elected education official think?

A news release just out from Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn has this to say:

“I would like to thank Representative Sam Hunt for sponsoring HB 1450. I support testing. But I don’t support overtesting. Beginning in the 2014-15 school year, 11th graders will have to take two additional tests, as well as pass five tests for graduation. The two tests will satisfy the “career and college ready” goals of the new Common Core State Standards in math and English language arts. So beginning with the Class of 2016, students will be required to pass five tests and take two additional tests. Giving seven state-required tests during high school takes too much time away from real classroom learning. I urge the Legislature to pass House Bill 1450.”

We seem to be moving on.

MARK TRAHANT   Austerity

It’s hard to see the U.S. Senate as a democratic institution in the 21st century. A voter from Wyoming has nearly seventy times the representation as a citizen from California. And that understates the case significantly because on top of that lop-sided balance, the Senate also has rules that call for super-majorities, giving those small states even more power.

Alan Durning from the Sightline Institute made this point a couple of years ago when he wrote: “The Senate doesn’t just magnify small-states’ influence a little. It magnifies their power massively. Consider the Cascadia region, which covers all of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, plus parts of Alaska, California, Montana, and Wyoming (along with the Canadian province of British Columbia). Each of these states, of course, has equal representation in the US Senate. This chart shows the number of people per US Senator in these states. There are 18 million Californians for each of the state’s two Senators. In Wyoming, the equivalent number is 272,000. If every US Senator represented the same number of people as do Wyoming’s two Senators, Oregon would have 14 Senators.That’s right, Oregon would have 14 Senators! Washington, for its part, would have 24, far outnumbering its current 9 Representatives in the House.California? California would have 136.”

Now calculate those numbers for Indian Country. The Census says there are 5.1 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the U.S. So, using the same formula of 272,00, there would be at least 18 Native American representatives in the Senate.

Don’t like that formula? Well, the collective land mass of tribal nations, villages, and communities, tops 87,000 square miles. That’s a larger land base than most states (the average for the 50 states is only 75,881.66 square miles).

Later today we’ll find out if the Senate is going to take even baby steps to limit filibuster (now at the point where a Senator only has to threaten a filibuster to stop legislation unless there are 60 votes).

But on the issue of austerity, the irony is that the Senate represents the best hope going forward for a balanced approach to how budgets are cut.

Congressional budgets are a relatively modern enterprise. Before the 1970s, the federal budget was presented by the President and then Congress passed appropriation bills for each agency. Continue Reading »

BILL OF THE DAY

This bill is getting a good deal of blasting in Washington, and it’s not hard to see why – though it’s positioned as (and could be in fact) a way to raise money for public services without raising taxes.

House Bill 2051 (as its digest describes) “Authorizes the sale of naming rights of the state’s transportation facilities to pay for the ongoing operations and maintenance of the facilities and, when appropriate, to fund future capital needs of these facilities. Requires the transportation commission, as an alternative to the naming or renaming process and for requesting entities or persons willing to pay for such naming or renaming rights, to develop, set, and approve by rule the applicable fees and guidelines governing the naming and renaming of state transportation facilities.”

A hearing on it was held Tuesday.

Backed by State Representative Jan Angel, R-Port Orchard, the measure has already drawn a lot of sarcastic response. Representative Sam Hunt, D-Olympia: “I think of perhaps the CenturyLink Capitol Building or something like that. How far does this go?” Representative Jake Fey, D-Tacoma: “Would you contemplate that the part that says Tacoma Narrows bridge or Deception Pass Bridge would be gone, and it might be the ‘Chuck E. Cheese Bridge?’ Are you concerned about the loss of that history?” (And they, maybe, weren’t even being sarcastic.)

The Tacomans might have had a little extra sensitivity there. A few years ago a run was made at selling corporate naming rights to the Tacoma Dome. It was a serious proposal and got close to passage, but community activists rose up and beat down the proposal. It’s Tacoma’s dome, they said, not the dome of some deep pocket.

Will be interesting to see how far this goes.

To judge from the reactions on the conference call/press conference this afternoon from Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the main emotion must be relief.

That, when they conversed with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, their heads weren’t bitten off in a rage at Washington’s voters deciding that marijuana should be legal.

The conversation was pleasant, and – from their description – Holder seemed to be more in listening than in talking mode.

They have a number of things to talk about. There was nothing “dispositive,” Inslee said, on the big one: Whether the feds plan to go after Washingtonians who start doing what Washington law (though not federal law) now says is legal. What about people who sink money into businesses that the new state law contemplates will be basic parts of the process needed to make the law work? No one knows.

Two points Inslee did mention about subjects of under discussion, however, are of interest.

One is what Washington will do to “contain” state-legal marijuana, to keep it from being exported across state lines. (He said that the Washington State Patrol, among other organizations, are considering the question.) The other was the possibility of a federal lawsuit aimed at Washington (and presumably Colorado as well), though what it would seek, exactly, isn’t clear. That a judge order a state to throw out a state law because the feds don’t like it? Seemingly improbable, but Ferguson indicated that a team of attorneys are looking into defenses for the state if a lawsuit should materialize.

Inslee said he expects to chat again with Holder: “This is the first of what I think will be a continuing series of discussions,” he said. That may be the most clearly predictable point right now. – Randy Stapilus

RANDY STAPILUS   West of the Cascades

We’ll concur here with Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune in hauling out the dictionary and declaring that talk – like that of Democratic Seattle Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles – that the new management of the Washington Senate amounted to a coup, is excessive.

It i certainly unusual, at least in the Northwest, for two members of one party (Democrats) to break away and join with the opposing (Republican) caucus to form a new operating majority, after the general election apparently had left the Democrats in charge.

But they did it according to the rules – the majority rules. Which they changed, as well, on Monday, opening a tasty assortment of changes that could wind up benefiting either side.

If the “coup” talk among some Democrats was a little much, so too was the talk among some Republicans that theirs was a “bipartisan” coalition. Not really. When the two Democrats who shifted over were a former Republican legislator (Rodney Tom) and a near-Republican breakaway of long standing (Tim Sheldon), that’s hardly the case. When a Democrat came up with the label for their governing caucus as BINO – Bipartisan in Name Only – that sounded like a joke destined to stick, because there was truth in it.

But the governing caucus is legit.

This majority does however has the look of a highly flammable coalition. The demands of a single member could throw it into question, which is why one-vote majorities always have a hard time keeping effective control. If the caucus is closely cohesive and not given to firey displays of personality, it can work. But it only takes one to create a serious issue, and there are some distinct personalities in this caucus.

They’re running a high-wire act. All the Senate Democrats have to do is sit back and watch … and comment.

From a release out today from Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kriedler:

With two of the state’s largest health insurers sitting on surpluses totaling $2.2 billion, Washington’s top insurance regulator wants to use some of that money to lower costs for consumers.
According to the companies’ most recent financial statements, Regence BlueShield’s surplus has grown to $1.05 billion. Premera Blue Cross’ surplus is $1.15 billion.
“These are non-profit companies,” said Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler. “It’s hard to square their billion-dollar surpluses with the fact that families are struggling to afford health insurance.”
Kreidler is proposing legislation that would allow his office to consider surpluses when reviewing nonprofit health insurers’ proposed rates. As things stand now, his staff must ignore them.
“As I’ve said before, it’s like trying to ignore an elephant in the room,” Kreidler said. “And the elephant’s getting bigger.”
The surpluses of both Regence and Premera have more than doubled in a decade. In the first nine months of 2012, Regence’s grew by $60 million. Premera’s grew by nearly $182 million.
“It’s important to remember that these are not reserves, which are set aside to pay future claims,” Kreidler said. “These billion-dollar surpluses are in addition to their reserves.”

TREES ON US 2: Falling trees laden with heavy snow and ice create hazardous conditions on US 2. (Photo/Washington Department of Transportation)

 
This week’s front cover from the Washington Weekly Briefing. It seemed timely, as snow is actually falling outside where we are (just south of Washington).

An unfortunate commentary on the news diets of the reading public – even what remains of the newspaper-reading public …

A piece in the Slog recounts the 10 most-read (online) articles for the year in the Seattle Times:

“That’s six stories about death [murder celebrity, blizzard], two about the weather, one about sports, and one about Microsoft’s new logo. Those were the top ten stories in our state’s paper of record. During a presidential election year.”

Not a happy commentary.

Preview from the next Washington Weekly Digest:

A new proposed rule from the Washington Liquor Control Board highlights some of the ongoing aftermath of the conversion of the state liquor sales system from public to private hands.

Rule 12-24-089 said that “The passage of Initiative 1183 and the privatization of spirits theft and product loss is significant and increasing. This is contributing to increased underage access to alcohol. Rules are needed to clarify reporting requirements of product loss due to theft and internal shrinkage.”