It truly is the most wonderful time of the year here in the Evergreen. Fall has reached its apogee, and the air is as crisp as my lungs have ever felt it—and that’s counting past November trips to Vermont, which around Thanksgiving is about as close as one can get to waking up in a Norman Rockwell painting. The sunrise over Rainier is a fiery red these days, and sunsets at Golden Gardens Beach here in Seattle are a sight to behold. But if my last post—this blog’s first—wasn’t sufficiently clear, let me (dis)assure you that Washington’s vast autumnal splendor firmly ends at the steps of the Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion.
As we speak, legislative staff in Olympia are working (though soon, perhaps, less tirelessly) to prepare a new slate of bills for the 2024 session, some of which will be available in prefile form as early as December 4th. That week we will begin giving next year’s agenda the wall-to-wall coverage (and scrutiny) it deserves. In the meantime, below we present a prefilesampling of this past year’s legislative and gubernatorial misadventures, which should help curb your appetite ahead of tomorrow’s feast and festivities. It will also give you some good ammunition for the inevitable tête-à-tête between your MAGA brother from Ellensburg and the Port Townsend aunt who insists you call her “Starflower.”
Our policymakers simply don’t know—or perhaps don’t care—what it is we Washingtonians actually want from our state and local governments. The answer is simple: freedom. Freedom from crime; from incompetence; and of course, from government itself. Yes, achieving freedom across-the-board still entails some degree of public intervention in the private sector. No libertarian or conservative worth their salt would argue for the two to completely and forever decouple. Still, Washington ranks 41st for “regulatory freedom” in the Cato Institute’s most recent Freedom in the 50 States report. And if the last couple years give any indication, it is that lawmakers and administrators at the state, county, and local levels are not wielding their vastly outsized powers for good.
First let’s start with freedom from crime. According to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (“WASPC”), theft and vandalism across the state are up nearly 10% this year, while homicides are at their highest since WASPC began tracking the number in 1980. All this with a rock-bottom statewide staffing rate of 1.36 officers per 1,000 people—the lowest of all fifty for the thirteenth year running. Among King County’s “solutions” was to give $260,000 to a juvenile redirection program run by a registered sex offender with no credentials—information that the most perfunctory of internet searches would have easily disclosed.
Neither has Olympia done much to improve the situation. Forbes this year ranked Washington first in retail thefts (go us!), and third for the dollar-amount stolen per capita—$347 in five-finger discounts for every Washingtonian, to be precise. Little wonder, then, that retailers are fleeing the state in droves. And the closest Olympia came to offering solutions to the problem swiftly died in committee in March (not that it promised to be much of a panacea, anyway). Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s retail crime “taskforce” has not offered much help, either, charging just one individual since forming in April. And these are just the highlights.
When it comes to incompetence, Governor Inslee and his allies have worked hard this year to plunge public trust to new and uncharted depths. Our indispensable ferry system is in dire need of upgrades and additional ships, though none are expected until 2027. In fairness, the governor has been busy elsewhere. In October, he blasted a federal decision to allow pipeline expansion in-state, a project judged to have minimal—if any—environmental impact, and a much-needed addition to a state that typically ranks third-highest in gas prices. In July, his administration proposed diverting millions in federal law-enforcement funding to more “equity”-driven programs, a move that prompted a bipartisan letter from our congressional delegation demanding to know where and how his Department of Commerce plans to close the budgetary gap. And as Washington continues suffering one of the country’s worst housing shortages, Inslee’s anti-homelessness Right-of-Way Initiative has spent more than $143 million to permanently house just 126 people.
Inaction in Olympia—combined with the strange items for which they do show passion—is hobbling the state economy, and fixing it won’t just take phone calls and fundraising. Even with a year to go before federal election day, it is certainly not too soon to remind everyone to vote like their lives and livelihoods depend on it. Because after a particularly dystopian stretch in Evergreen history, you know they kind of do. Until then, please keep tabs on everything we at the Citizen Action Defense Fund are doing to make the perpetual fight for freedom at least a little bit smoother.
Let me conclude on a lighter note, in the spirit of Thanksgiving and so I sound less curmudgeonly given I am (allegedly) still in my thirties. We do, after all, have a lot to be thankful for—as long as you avoid all national news for the next week or so. And so too does our brave state, which just celebrated its 135th anniversary (its quintricentennial, for the sesquipedalians) two weeks ago—Veterans’ Day. It is an easy way to remember that Washington, thirteenth in population, ranks fifth among all states in total number of active-duty troops. Feeding them and troops everywhere is a monumental undertaking. If you’re worried you’ve ordered too much for Thanksgiving, take solace that its less than the 51,000 pounds of bird; 74,000 pounds of beef; 21,000 pounds of ham; 67,000 pounds of shrimp and 7,000 gallons of eggnog that the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency shipped out ahead of Turkey Day 2020—the last time (to our knowledge) that they published those numbers. Let’s hope our men and women in uniform get even more servings for their service this year.
Alki (and Gobble Gobble),
Sam Spiegelman