Helen Sommers: An Oral History

The Press
teachers and take their experience to classrooms
• Allowing dedicated teachers to be rehired by
school districts after they retire
• Continuing the Reading Corps and Promise
Scholarships
• Establishing a new Technology Institute at
the University of Washington, Tacoma
The budget improves safety for the state’s most
vulnerable children and adults. It reduces caseloads
of child-protection employees, improves foster care
and creates safer conditions for aging and disabled
citizens, the governor said.
“This budget also recognizes our water shortage
by including funding that will help us provide water
for our farms, cities and towns and for salmon in
our rivers and streams,” Locke said.
The governor said the budget addresses top
public safety concerns including funding for a new
special commitment center for sex offenders at the
state corrections facility on McNeil Island.
The budget also funds a program to fight the
methamphetamine epidemic, restricting sales of
ingredients used to make this dangerous, illegal drug.
Locke said the budget respects state workers,
providing a salary increase that works toward parity
with salary increases for state-funded schoolteachers.
Locke also signed a $2.5 billion capital budget
for the 2001-03 biennium. It provides important
funding for new public schools and building projects
at state colleges and universities. It also funds
renovation projects at state corrections and mental
health facilities and at state parks.
Finally, the governor signed a $3.4 billion
“current law” transportation budget that he said
continues existing transportation programs but is
“woefully inadequate” in the face of serious traffic
congestion problems.
Locke called a third special session of the
Legislature to begin July 16 for action on a longterm
state transportation plan, including new
revenue sources.
Budget blues
The state’s transportation crisis
hits a political traffic jam.
Lisa Stone
Wednesday, Apr 12 2000
pg. 285
Don’t blow the state’s savings,
warns Rep. Helen Sommers.
IT’S HIGH NOON in Olympia,
and no one is backing down.
State government is hopelessly
gridlocked over how to solve the
funding crisis brought on by
voters’ approval of tax-cutting
Initiative 695 last November. I-695’s sponsor Tim
Eyman says the politicians are lame. Eyman says
we can spend the state’s $1.2 billion surplus and
fix the transportation system without ever missing
the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax [MVET] that his
initiative gutted.
Unfortunately, voters may soon learn the hard
way that Eyman doesn’t possess all the facts about
just how rich the state really is. Road builders and
regional planners say that even before Eyman
became a household name, tax revenues were not
keeping up with the transportation demands of
our population growth. By cutting off the revenue
stream MVET provided, voters have actually made
gloomy economic forecasts even darker.
Being hot has its drawbacks, as any catwalk
princess will tell you, and Washington state is perhaps
just too damn attractive for its own good. Rick
Olson with the Puget Sound Regional Council says
that before I-695 passed, the state expected to see
a tax shortfall of $16 billion over the next 20 years.
Now that the state can no longer count on MVET,
that predicted shortfall has grown to $25 billion.
Olson says by 2020 the state will have 3.2 million
more residents than it has now, 900,000 more jobs
for them to drive to, and 700,000 new homes for
them to drive from. But as I-695 has shown, levying