Saving a day may add up to savings

OLYMPIA – Soon to be heard in offices statewide: “Thank God it’s Thursday.”

At the urging of state workers, Gov. Chris Gregoire has agreed to let hundreds of them in nine state agencies switch to four-day work weeks.

The move – which means working four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days – is intended to reduce energy use, janitorial costs and commuting.

Gregoire said she’s willing to try it, so long as the agencies can maintain the level of service that taxpayers expect.

The chosen offices include about 650 workers and 260,000 square feet of building space.

Among the other energy-savers being tried in state offices: flex-fuel vehicles for the state motor pool and software that automatically shuts down unused computers.

7th: Sharp elbows in GOP vs. GOP race

The northeastern Washington legislative faceoff between longtime legislative aide Shelly Short and architect Sue Lani Madsen is looking a lot like a grudge match.

Both are well-known. Madsen ran for a statehouse seat in 2004, losing to state Rep. Joel Kretz, and Short has spent the last 14 years as the rural district’s local contact to members of Congress and Kretz.

In the August primary, Short came out with 26.7 percent to Madsen’s 26.4 percent. It was an unusual five-way, all-Republican race.

Just days before the voting deadline, Short’s husband, Mitch Short, was charged with aggravated first-degree theft. Amid mounting family debts, he allegedly stole more than $3,000 from a local fair organization he headed. He has denied any wrongdoing.

In a fundraising letter to supporters last week, Shelly Short claimed victory in the primary, briefly addressed the fair controversy and lambasted Madsen as a stealth liberal.

“The vicious attacks on my husband, Mitch, came as a complete surprise,” Short wrote, saying that she’s confident he’ll be exonerated. “I hope and pray that you will keep faith in us.”

She also blasted Madsen for accepting campaign contributions from “Westside, pro-choice, environmentalist supporters. Those supporters have also given tens of thousands of dollars to (the) likes of Christine Gregoire, Gary Locke, Naral Pro-Choice Washington, Emily’s List, Moveon.org, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to just name a few.”

Madsen scoffs at that.

“Apparently I’m on speaking terms with Obama and Biden, too,” she said. “It’s just so outrageous it’s silly.”

Short says she’s the strong conservative in the race, and cites Madsen’s 2004 statements that although a Republican, she was a middle-of-the-road person who would put issues before party.

“When my opponent lost to a strong conservative like Joel Kretz, she must have got the message,” Short wrote. “Now she is telling everyone that she is a strong conservative Republican. She must be hoping that the voters have a short-term memory. Would the real Sue Lani Madsen please stand up?”

Madsen said she will indeed put her local constituents and their issues before party, which she doesn’t see as a bad thing.

As for lessons learned from the 2004 race, she said, there was one that is coming in handy now.

“I learned how important it is to define yourself,” she said, “before other people start sticking labels on you.”

Press releases and other secrets

The state Legislative Ethics Board recently issued a mild reproach – called a “letter of instruction” – to state Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, for posting five state press releases on his campaign Web site.

This is a no-no because taxpayers pay the salaries of a platoon of legislative press-release-writers, and the law bans the use of any state asset in campaigning.

Goodman, who promptly removed the releases from the Web site when someone complained, readily acknowledged that they’d been there and signed the board’s letter “to effectuate a resolution of this matter.” Case closed.

But the most interesting thing about the board’s ruling is an unusual dissent by state Rep. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle.

Yes, Pedersen wrote, the board properly followed its own precedent. But he argues that the precedents are wrong.

“Once prepared, press releases drafted for legislators are public records … and should be broadly available to the general public even (or especially) in the context of campaigns,” Pedersen wrote. To the extent that there was any expense involved in posting those public records on a Web site for the public, he writes, it was paid by the campaign.

It’s an interesting point. Clearly, the intent of the board is to avoid letting the incumbent capitalize on state-authored self-promotion. But it’s also true that this means that press releases are routinely yanked off official legislative Web sites once campaigns begin and not restored until after the election. (I posted a local example of this on my blog, www.eyeonolympia.com.)

Although Goodman’s case involved his campaign Web site, it seems that there’s a good case to be made for leaving the press releases up, at least on the official legislative site. As things stand now, state webmasters are erasing the information at precisely the time the public is trying to judge candidates.

In other words, you can only easily see what your lawmaker was touting or spouting off about AFTER the election.

Turnout: Who did and who didn’t

With the dust settled from last month’s primary, we now know that turnout was a pretty-good 43 percent.

“When you consider that there were no U.S. Senate races or any hot statewide primary races this year to bring out more voters, it was good turnout,” says the state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Sam Reed.

Look, for example, at the primaries in places like Iowa, he said, where just 9 percent of voters bothered to cast a ballot. In Utah, it was a startling 8 percent.

Other low-voting states this summer: Alabama (15 percent), Connecticut (14 percent), Missouri (19 percent) and Nevada (18 percent).

Here in Washington, turnout was particularly good in small rural counties. Locally, Ferry, Pend Oreille and Stevens all saw more than 50 percent of voters cast a ballot. (Spokane and Whitman counties both had about 46 percent turnout.)

Worst turnout in the state: King County, with less than 35 percent.

And now for Round Two, where it really counts: general-election ballots will be mailed out around Oct. 17th.

School desks or prison cells?

As state lawmakers continue their long slog to reform the way Washington pays for public schools, an unusual alliance of police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and school officials is making a case that paying for school saves us all from paying for more prisons.

The group’s too-long name says it all: “Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Washington.”

On Friday in Olympia, the group cited research indicating that early learning programs are the best way to combat high school dropout rates. And they offered up some sobering statistics on the correlation between dropping out of school and getting stuffed into the back of a police car:

•nearly 70 percent of all U.S. prison inmates failed to earn a high school diploma,

•dropouts are 3 1/2 times more likely to be arrested,

•and dropouts are 8 times more likely to go to prison.

In Washington, the group says, more than 1 in 4 students doesn’t graduate from high school on time.

But there was one particularly striking statement extrapolated from those figures. The group claims that boosting graduation rates by 10 percentage points in Washington would likely mean 40 fewer murders and 2,600 fewer assaults.

Each year.