1995 Legislature Gets High Marks
Business lobbyists popped champagne corks as Washington’s newly conservatized Legislature headed for home last week. Regulators and tax collectors sulked. And the state’s universities heaved happy sighs of relief.
It was a significant session. It improved the state’s notoriously hostile business climate, protected education, assaulted local government and the state’s environmental quality, gave state workers a deserved raise, taught the new conservatives a needed lesson in compromise, and left some glaring governmental flaws unaddressed.
For years Washington has repelled and browbeaten business, which pays the bills and creates the jobs. The 1995 Legislature passed a regulatory reform bill that limits the powers of regulation writers and insists they assess costs and benefits before slapping mandates on private enterprise. In addition, the Legislature reduced the tax deterrents to job-creating industrial investments, and it rolled back the state’s regressive, economically damaging business and occupation tax.
A misguided attack on higher education, coming from conservatives just as student demand for higher education is beginning to soar, was stopped. Instead, legislators increased college enrollment capacity by 5,258 students, allowed tuition to rise by a justifiable 4 percent per year, increased financial aid appropriations and upheld the state’s support for university operating costs. Good work!
But conservatives made the foolish mistake of listening more closely to business lobbyists than to local governments. They enacted Initiative 164, a sellout to development and timber interests. It requires that governments pay property owners for the impact of decisions to limit commercial activity. This threatens to hamstring growth management, among other things. The public could pay a high price, unless the initiative is repealed, in damage to the environment and local quality of life.
Spokane’s priorities fared reasonably well, thanks to capital appropriations for a Pacific Science Center here and design of the next building at the state’s higher education park at Riverpoint.
Consumer-oriented health care reforms, adopted in 1993, were replaced with a version crafted to please insurers and employers. The new reforms open doors for small business people to find affordable insurance, but they allow higher insurance rates for older people, who need insurance most. This will be a mixed blessing.
The new conservatives Eastern Washington sent to Olympia learned, by listening to more experienced brethren such as Rep. Steve Fuhrman, that compromise yields progress while rigidity can mean irrelevance. By compromising, members who had demanded drastic tax and budget cuts accepted a smaller but still significant curtailment of the state budget’s growth rate.
Left largely unaddressed was the still-oversized state bureaucracy. Bills to allow privatization of services died, and cuts in the state’s bloated middle-management ranks barely were an issue.
What the heck. It’ll give lawmakers something to do when they reconvene in January. Final grade for the 1995 session? B-plus, with extra credit given for changing state government’s direction.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board