Frank Bartel

Increasingly, working men and women tell me the main reason they elected to take this or that job or stay with such and such employer is health care coverage. Wages often are of secondary importance in families where the primary bread winner's employer fails to provide insurance. Typically the other spouse will accept a job with health coverage over a position paying considerably higher wages. And that decision seems to make good sense for at least a couple of reasons:

The governor's office wants you to know that not all Washington white collar workers occupy brandspanking-new state-ofthe-art office quarters. Take Judith Gilmore, who is Gov. Mike Lowry's representative in Spokane.

Accountability. Pulling your weight if you can. Getting help if you can't. Paying a price for not trying. From what I can glean, these are priorities of the business community for welfare reform. The intent is not to be mean.

Hardly a month goes by, says Jim Lundberg, when Washington, D.C., lobbyists don't hit him up for more money to help save the benefits of senior citizens. "They strike the fear of God into older people by sending big fat envelopes full of horror stories about benefits being taken away unless the lobbyists get a check for $15 or $20," says the Spokane senior. He used to send them money.

Nowhere is the decay of such fundamental American precepts as honesty, integrity, accountability, right and wrong more apparent than in the nation's legal system. Only 10 years ago, citizens overwhelmingly viewed the practice of law as a profession imbued with high standards of conduct. Today, two out of three Americans (67 percent) think lawyers are not usually honest or are only sometimes honest.

Here's a tip for whomever is in charge of getting rubber-tired trolley-replica buses for downtown Spokane's new Wall Street pedestrian mall route. I think I know where you can pick up some at bargain prices. Yakima is going out of the trolley business, and it looks like they'll be putting their fleet up for sale.

So Tom Foley has become a lobbyist. One day he's second in ascendancy to the presidency. The next day he's peddling influence with a Texas law firm that lobbies capitol pols for a huge stable of giant corporations. Actually, the firm didn't exactly use the word lobbyist straight out. What the press release said was: "The law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, L.L.P., announced today that former House Speaker Thomas S. Foley will join the firm as a partner with a concentration in international affairs."

An explosion of part-time jobs is finally getting some of the attention it so desperately deserves. Part-time work as an element of economic vigor has been so strenuously ignored that there is a dearth of useful data. It consists mainly of official estimates, a smattering of statistics of highly questionable reliability, and word of mouth.

Privatizing low-end public service jobs will accomplish little or nothing in the way of improving government cost efficiency, argues Washington Gov. Mike Lowry. Whenever talk turns to contracting out government work, the governor complains, janitorial jobs pop into people's heads. Unfortunately, that makes no sense, Lowry says.

Spokane will soon top North Idaho and most other places in the West as a magnet to manufacturers on the move. Whether they are relocating or just expanding, this will be the place to go and to grow. It will, that is, if Republicans go along with his proposal to exempt new investments in plant equipment from the state's sales tax, contends Washington Gov. Mike Lowry.

Marshall Clark has been angling to bring Red Lobster to Spokane for eight years. That's even longer than I've been trying to land a Red Lobster. But my fishing excursions are a labor of love, whereas Clark gets paid, as the world's largest dinner house chain's real estate broker hereabouts.