Don’t Believe Every Cookie You Read
Lawmakers staggering to the end of the fourth longest legislative session in history were taking comfort this week in the most obscure signs of adjournment.
Take Rep. Todd Mielke, R-Spokane, dubbed “Mr. Fix-it” for his nearly round-the-clock ministrations to dead and dying compromise agreements needed to bring the session to a close.
“Look at this,” Mielke said, producing the scrap of paper from a fortune cookie he gulped before the House went back into yet another night session Wednesday.
“It is good to know that things are improving,” the fortune read.
Mielke predicted adjournment that night … incorrectly, it turned out.
Time to go home
Things got strange as the Legislature went through its death throes, tying up business so lawmakers could go home Thursday.
They picked fights that stretched for days over issues that had barely raised an eyebrow in the previous 135 days, such as whether to rebuild a prison dairy.
And they remained silent on issues so big no one dared bring them up at all, such as eliminating all spending for abortion.
“Some things don’t become an issue if they never come up,” a smiling House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee, said.
Complicated, last-minute deals were hatched, as lawmakers roped unrelated bills together, hoping they might be saved.
Sleep deprivation helped lawmakers get worked up about things they might normally have handled a bit more discretely. Sen. James West, R-Spokane, nearly came to tears in the Senate Ways and Means Committee over some snarled and, in his opinion, outright vindictive bill trading.
“There is plenty of garbage in this place right now,” agreed Sen. Dwight Pelz, D-Seattle. “Plenty of absurdity. I hope we get beyond it.”
By the time the session was over, House members stood side by side in the House chamber, doing the wave, and singing “Amazing Grace” as a reporter accompanied them on a penny whistle.
Rep. Cathy McMorris, R-Colville, helped top it off by dumping a milk can full of paper hole punches on the Speaker’s head as he stood startled on the rostrum.
“Any dignity I had left is gone,” Ballard figured.
The giant illuminated House reader board, where lawmakers’ votes are tallied, offered the best advice: “The House is adjourned … GO HOME.”
Not enough?
You might think that after state lawmakers forked over more than $500 million in tax breaks, mostly for businesses, the National Federation of Independent Business would be handing out thank you notes.
Not exactly. “Half a Loaf Better than Nothing,” the NFIB announced in a news release taking stock of the session.
Apparently repealing the 1993 health care reform act; cutting 1993 business and occupation tax rate hikes in half; getting rid of the sales tax altogether on new plant and equipment for manufacturers and lopping more than $300 million or so off the unemployment insurance tax isn’t quite enough.
Was the dog sick?
State Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn issued a public spanking to Walla Walla Valley Medical Services Corp. for questionable expenses this week, criticizing the “free spending style” of its executives.
The company, a non-profit now owned by King County Medical Blue Shield, was raked over the coals in an audit launched last year.
The audit cited $1,085 spent for golf in Arizona, $988 in unexplained personal charges, and $366 in kennel fees for President Dennis Lease’s dog.
Senn levied a $25,000 fine against the insurer, but suspended it after King County Medical Blue Shield, which acquired the company in the fall of 1994, promised better financial management and oversight.