Legislative Commentary

Twenty-four years as a state legislator and two years as Senate majority leader have put me on a first-name basis with people with some pretty impressive résumés: leaders of the biggest industries and companies in our state, members of Congress, and so on. You know, folks whose accomplishments in life are easy to admire.

But one of the people I have admired most is someone I met not as a legislator but as a Ritzville native and a member of our local Zion Philadelphia Church: Rudolph “Rudy” Thaut.

Mr. Thaut passed away earlier this month, the result of a fall. He was 98. When I heard the news I thought first of the man who was the best example of a U.S. Postal Service employee, a dedicated member of the Ritzville Lions Club, and a person who shaped the lives of many young men as a Scout leader.

I also recalled the other side of Rudy Thaut – Ritzville High School Class of 1938, who as a private 1st class in the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps was taken prisoner by Japanese forces in 1942 following the Bataan Death March and the fall of Corregidor, in the Philippine Islands. It was on Feb. 20, 2003 that our state House of Representatives recognized him and other former prisoners of war with a resolution I introduced.

To me, Mr. Thaut exemplified what’s become known as the “Greatest Generation” – the Americans born during or shortly after World War I, who grew up during the hard times of the Great Depression and went on to fight for our country in World War II.

I very much respected him for his faith, community service, and how he had survived so much hardship as a young man but never allowed that to define his life.

Remembering what he and other Americans went through (like the late former 9th District Rep. Robert Goldsworthy, also a World War II POW in Japan) also helps me to keep things in perspective when I get tired of the nonsense that goes with being a legislator.

A cheap shot at Washington agriculture that cost taxpayers $570,000

The nonsense isn’t limited to Olympia. Earlier this month the chairman of our Senate environment committee correctly took aim at an outrageous advertising campaign that targeted Washington farmers.

Thanks to the Capital Press, we now know a $570,000 grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency was funneled through a Puget Sound tribe and environmental activists to a liberal Seattle-based PR firm that produced the completely misleading billboard picture, along with transit-bus boards that were pulled because they violated an agency policy against political advertising.

Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Whatcom County, has called on the EPA to explain who signed off on the ad campaign, which directs people to a website urging Washington citizens to contact lawmakers to advocate tougher regulations on agriculture. The website greets you with separate video shots of a tractor, brown water and a dead salmon, and there’s a cow silhouette above the word “polluters.”

I receive countless emails that are form letters from activist groups, and the “What’s Upstream” campaign offers a form letter that may be the most misleading I’ve seen. It claims, for instance, that Washington “has no permit system in place to regulate many agricultural practices” and “unlike other industries, protecting our waterways from polluted run-off is voluntary for the agriculture industry.” Yet our state’s Water Pollution Control Act (RCW 90.48) makes it illegal, for farmers or anyone else, to cause or contribute pollution to streams. And as a farmer, I can assure you that the use of crop-protection products is highly regulated.

Todd Myers at the Washington Policy Center has uncovered another angle that makes this fraudulent attack even more disgraceful: the photo on the billboard and the bus-boards, showing cows standing in a stream, is labeled “Amish Cows” on a website that sells generic photos. In other words, that isn’t a Washington body of water, and those aren’t Washington cows standing in it.

Here’s how Todd summarized it in a blog post Wednesday:

“Put simply, rather than finding an actual example of a violation, the designers found a deceptive, stock photo from Amish country and passed them off as being “upstream” in Washington state.

“Salmon recovery is contentious. There has been a good working relationship between groups on the Salmon Recovery Council. Pitting farmers against salmon, however, is a losing strategy. Using phony photos only makes it harder to find sustainable environmental solutions.

“Sadly, this is what you get when you hire a downtown Seattle public relations firm who doesn’t understand farming and cares more about politics than the facts. One more example that some Seattle environmentalists are all hat and no cattle.”

It’s OK with me if people want to pass along information about how they believe pollution “affects the health of Washington’s waterways, people and fish,” which is what the tribe and its partners claim to be doing. It is not OK to use taxpayer dollars to put lies on billboards and transit buses. I look forward to learning how the EPA tries to defend this to Senator Ericksen.

I-90 speed increase to be discussed at local meetings this week

Should the speed limit be raised to 75 mph on Interstate 90 between George and the Lincoln-Spokane county line? The state Department of Transportation is thinking about making that change and looking for public comments. DOT will held a meeting about it in Ritzville on Tuesday, April 19, from 4-7 p.m. at the Best Western Plus Bronco Inn, and in Moses Lake the following day during a state transportation commission meeting that begins at 11:30 a.m.

This proposal is possible thanks to a bill from my 9th District colleague, Rep. Joe Schmick, which was passed by the Legislature in 2015. It allows the state transportation secretary to raise the speed limit on any Washington highway to 75 mph.

Escaped psychiatric patients caught, head of psychiatric hospital gone

My previous report mentioned the escape of two dangerous patients from Western State Hospital. They were both captured, although the more dangerous of the two, an accused murderer, made it all the way to Spokane Valley.

But that wasn’t enough to save the state-run psychiatric hospital’s chief executive officer. Governor Inslee fired him Tuesday, saying “new transformational leadership” is needed at the “troubled hospital.”

Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake was within the 9th Legislative District for many years, so I have a sense of the challenges a psychiatric hospital can present from the standpoints of staffing and security. I supported the adjustments we made in the state budget this year to send additional funding to Western State Hospital, to hire 50-plus more nurses and address other staffing concerns.

The ousted CEO had been on the job since 2013, Inslee’s first year as governor, and was hired by the person Inslee appointed to head the Department of Social and Health Services, who himself stepped down recently.

I can’t help but notice that Inslee has reached back to the administration of his predecessor, former Gov. Chris Gregoire, for the new Western State chief. She will start later this month, and as the Tacoma newspaper correctly put it, “has her work cut out for her.”