This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

An old conspiracy theory holds that the Washington Education Association – the state teachers union – targets a school district every so often and urges its local union affiliate to stage a bruising strike.

The resulting school closure is as much a display of raw power – a cautionary tale for other districts and the Legislature – as it is a quarrel over the terms of a contract.

We’ve never seen proof, but the strike in Tacoma certainly doesn’t weaken the theory.

The final contract agreement – forcefully brokered by Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday – was no great coup for either the Tacoma Education Association or the school district.

The 2011 Legislature had ordained a 1.9 percent cut in teacher compensation, and it eliminated funding earmarked for holding down class size. In the end, the TEA – which had sought reductions in class sizes – more or less hung on to the status quo, though it gave up a training day that translated into a .5 percent pay cut.

The real flash point was the district’s insistence that administrators be allowed more discretion over which schools teachers are assigned. The union insisted on a traditional system that emphasized seniority.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Monday’s print edition.

The state Department of Transportation really does want to build a deep-bore tunnel to replace the crumbling Alaskan Way Viaduct, right?

Why in the world, then, are transportation officials giving tunnel opponents campaign fodder by denying their request for public records?

Late last week, the group behind an Aug. 16 referendum on the tunnel went to court, supposedly to force the state to produce the latest version of the tunnel financing plan.

State officials had earlier denied the document request, invoking the “deliberative process” exemption to the public records law because the financing plan is currently being reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Sunday’s print edition.

Quick quiz: Which event this week has the most potential to create aerospace jobs in Washington?

A) The National Labor Relations Board hearing in Seattle on whether Boeing violated labor law when it decided to locate its second production line for the 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina.

B) Congressional Republicans’ counter proceeding, “Unionization Through Regulation: The NLRB’s Holding Pattern on Free Enterprise,” to be staged in North Charleston, home of said Dreamliner plant.

C) A Washington state trade delegation’s trip to Europe to woo aerospace suppliers who could play a pivotal role in determining where Boeing builds the successor to its 737 plane.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Credit Gov. Chris Gregoire with out-of-the-box thinking for her plan to restructure the bureaucracy of education in this state. We just wish she’d thought a lot further out of the box.

Gregoire’s idea is intriguing, as far as it goes. She wants to lend some coherence to the collection of fiefdoms that reputedly oversees education at the state level.

Under her proposal, the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Board of Education, Higher Education Coordinating Board, State Board for Technical & Community Colleges and other entities would all get folded into a new state Department of Education.

Gregoire is very right about one thing: Public education in Washington ought to be a seamless whole, from preschool through technical or academic higher education. The system is inexcusably fragmented, more to protect turf than to serve students.

The lack of coordination is appallingly evident in the abundance of discouraged college students mired in remedial education, studying what they should have learned in high school, and the abundance of high school students doing college-level work without earning college credits for it.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Gov. Chris Gregoire had to perform an agonizing arithmetic to come up with a budget for the next biennium.

After the recession and the voters knocked a $4.6 billion breach between revenues and existing services, there was no way to balance the budget without hurting hundreds of thousands of people.

Cut health insurance for the poor, and people will die. Cut crucial education programs, and some children will forfeit their futures. Cut prison funding too far, and predators will go free. Cut food programs, and kids will go to bed hungry.

Cruel …

Read more »

Gov. Chris Gregoire visited with the editorial board today. She wanted to talk about her proposed budget that addresses a $4.6 billion shortfall. In addition to consolidating several state agencies, it makes drastic cuts in education, low-income health care, social services, public safety and state workers’ compensation. In Pierce County, she would shutter the McNeil Island prison and the Washington History Museum. Funding for state parks, the arts commission – gone.

“It’s not a budget I’m proud of. But it’s what the times call for,” she said, noting that it eliminates 80 programs and agencies. She expects legislators will come …

Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

The silence you’ve been hearing for months is the response of the Legislature’s Democrats to Washington’s fiscal emergency.

Now, on Gov. Chris Gregoire’s orders, they are finally about to act. After putting the job off since August, Democrats will join Republicans on Saturday in a special session to squeeze state programs by roughly $1 billion before the current biennium ends on June 30.

The urgency of convening the Legislature for damage control is a matter of simple arithmetic. Revenue shortfalls and the voters’ repeal of new taxes demolished the spending plan lawmakers jury-rigged last April to tide state government through next June. The gulf between that plan and the revenues needed to cover it has been broadening dangerously since summer.

Had the Legislature acted in August, the impact of the shortfall could have been spread over 10 months. Now the $1 billion of pain will have to be shoehorned into six months.

Better late than later. Dawdling until the full-blown haggling of the regular session begins in January might end in a nuclear strike on programs that serve some of the neediest Washingtonians.

The result would have been unconscionable and needless damage to the social safety net, higher education and other unprotected categories of state spending. The damage will be bad enough as it is.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Friday’s print edition.

Gov. Chris Gregoire has a lot on her plate. There’s the looming budget hole to be addressed, and a Legislature shamefully inclined to let her deal with it by herself. Then there’s that possible Obama administration nomination for solicitor general that she’s apparently intent on fending off.

Still, she should take some time out of that busy schedule and make four appointments that are her responsibility: to the state’s Public Records Exemption Accountability Committee, better known as the Sunshine Committee.

That committee was created in 2007 to annually review exemptions to the Public Disclosure Act, which requires that records be made available to the public and media. When voters approved the act in 1972, there were only 10 exemptions.

That list has exploded to more than 350, and it’s the Sunshine Committee’s duty to study them and recommend whether to repeal, amend or retain them. Read more »