Ensuring A Balanced Budget

In 2010 I was unwilling to make the level of cuts needed to balance the budget with an all cuts solution. We would have had to lay off thousands more teachers state-wide, eliminate our low-income college scholarship program, take the rest of the people off the Basic Health Plan, reduce the number of low-income kids getting health insurance and host of other decisions that I could not make.

I ran for office in 2002 to improve funding for education, not reduce it. Reality has a way of catching up to you, and nobody predicted an economic disaster of the scale we have faced over the last two years. I’m one of the more financially conservative members of my caucus, but I agreed to raise additional revenue as part of the solution this year because I felt the cuts would have a more devastating impact on the citizens of Washington than the modest increases we implemented.

Trying to find balanced solutions to intractable problems is why you elect people like me. If you want 100-percenters on either end of the spectrum you should find someone else. I tried to make thoughtful choices inside the decision matrix of what it is possible to accomplish. I pushed the envelope of what is possible and have made significant progress in a few areas over the last 8 years, including the two top items on my agenda when I ran for the first time in 2002.

Championing Our Schools

We have re-written the (formerly) incomprehensible school funding formulas to produce an education budget that can be understood at both the state and local levels, including a constitutionally-enforceable step-up in funding over the next 8 years that will get us to a rational level of funding. I drove this effort.

Getting 520 Built On-Time And On-Budget

This was a decade in the making when I started in Olympia and has been incredibly painful to get done. By sticking together the Eastside delegation forced a reasonable solution to this problem, and worked out the politics to make it happen. We overcame significant opposition from powerful interests that do not want a solution to the problem. We have more work to do on funding, but have approval for the floating part and the Eastside projects to start next year. This alone will create thousands of private industry construction jobs over the next few years.

Protecting Our Quality Of Life

Our quality of life is the reason so many of us live in the Pacific Northwest. I have been excited to be part of significant environmental wins, including driving the effort to be the first state to ban brominated flame-retardants, chemicals known to cause  endocrine damage to small children. As a result the Washington Conservation Voters named me one of their “Green Champions” this year.