Gambling deals announced under cloak of late Friday

Often when Gov. Chris Gregoire signs major documents – significant legislation, for example, or declarations of emergencies – it’s a very public event.

Her public relations people send out announcements well in advance. A state-paid photographer is usually brought in to capture the moment. The governor often celebrates by handing out special gubernatorial plastic pens. And the event, in case you missed it, is then followed up with another press release.

Things seem different, however, for the signing of gambling agreements.

Although the state’s tribes are proud of these compacts, which have provided a steady source of dollars to help pay for a growing array of badly needed educational, health and elder services on and around reservations, the timing of the surprise announcements that Gregoire has signed the agreements – usually on a Friday evening – is the sort of treatment that the Bush White House – and its predecessors – reserves for “bad news.”

Consider the following:

“The announcement that Gregoire had signed a historic, years-in-the-making gambling compact with the Spokane Tribe of Indians was e-mailed out at 6 p.m. on a Friday night: Feb. 16.

“Six weeks later – 5:12 p.m. Friday, March 30 – came another announcement, that Gregoire, surprise, had inked a new compact appendix covering 27 other tribes.

Among the results: the tribes will be allowed to own about 9,000 more slot-style machines, offer higher bets and, after three years, have as many as 4,000 machines at each of several large casinos in the Puget Sound region.

The agreement itself wasn’t a surprise – The Spokesman-Review and several other papers had written about it repeatedly. But the timing of the announcement that the governor had approved it – a big deal for both the state and for thousands of tribal members across the state – was done out of the public eye and announced on a day and time famous as a graveyard for burying controversial or bad news.

Here, for example, is part of a corporate press release guide from a company called Netco. “Sometimes, you may want to issue a release but not want a big audience or you might not want too much scrutiny by a specialist reporter. Your bad news may be best distributed at 7 pm on a Friday,” the guide advises would-be PR spin-meisters. “This is a blunt instrument approach and oh so obvious but senior journalists will be home for the weekend, the specialist reporters who may recognise the significance of the event will not be around and your release will be handled by lesser-experienced weekend staff who may not subject you to too much scrutiny.”

Lars Erickson, a spokesman for the governor, said Friday night that the timing wasn’t intended to minimize news coverage of the agreements. “It’s just the timing of when it was signed,” he said.

NASCAR gives up

Great Western Sports Inc., which for two years has been eyeing and trying to persuade lawmakers to steer millions of local tax dollars into a NASCAR track on the Kitsap Peninsula, has given up on the project.

“We’ve just made this decision, and now we’re going to sort of regroup internally” before considering the next step for a Pacific Northwest speedway, said spokesman Lenny Santiago. “We don’t have any other sites for it on, quote, unquote, the back burner.”

Locally generated taxes, including an admissions tax, would have paid for more than half of the $368 million track complex. Great Western Sports would have then leased the facility under a long-term contract.

The deal-killer, Great Western Sports President Grant Lynch said in a written statement, was a series of “significant revisions” that people were calling for to the tax plan. The changes, he said, would have hurt the track’s profitability.

How to get it done

“We now have a larger-sized cup. So rather than have a dainty little Seattle-sized espresso cup, where you have to lift your pinky finger to drink it, we have a good SUV-sized cup … So all of you can be seen drinking this kind of cup of coffee.”

– Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, telling the Senate about the arrival – in preparation for a series of late-night voting sessions – of bigger java mugs. (Note: Although the cups are bigger, Kline’s speech was firmly tongue-in-cheek. A Prius driver, he’s no fan of SUVs.)