booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

eappointment of a sharp young lawyer, Bill Wilkerson, as state fisheries director. One of
John Spellman’s best choices, Wilkerson was an apostle of Gardner’s policy of peaceful
negotiation to manage salmon runs.
* * *
Boosting the state’s cigarette tax by eight cents to a national high 31 cents was the
linchpin of Booth’s plan to finance half a billion dollars worth of water-quality projects over
the next decade. The tobacco lobby and smokers yowled, but the Lung Association and
Cancer Society were jubilant. Jeannette Hayner, the Republican leader in the Senate, was in
favor of good education and opposed to lung cancer but she likened the tax hike proposal
to “burning books to heat the school.” She predicted revenues would decline if the cost of
smokes became prohibitive, a classic Catch 22.
The governor asked for a 3 percent raise for teachers and other state employees.
That and acquiring more power over an un-elected bureaucracy and the water quality
program were his highest priorities for the 60-day 1986 legislative session, sure to be
fraught with partisanship. All 98 seats in the House and 24 of the 49 seats in the Senate
would be up for election that fall.
In his first State of the State address Booth emphasized that he couldn’t make
government more efficient with one hand tied behind his back. Commissions and boards
had become the fourth branch of government, making “major decisions about the life of
our citizens, yet you never have the opportunity to vote for them or probably even know
who they are.” He predicted that opponents would “talk about politics creeping into
government. My response to that is: Do we really need to protect government from the
people?” The governor said he was already looking ahead, doing his homework, to ensure
that 1987 would be the year when they focused on education. That likely would require
an income tax, he added, because there was no way to improve the schools without
additional resources. “I recognize that I’m battling the odds,” he said, “but education, both
K-12 and higher education, has more responsibility for the future well-being of our people
and communities than any other part of state government.”
Al Rosellini and Dixy Lee Ray supported Booth’s government reorganization plan but
Dixy scoffed at the need to spend hundreds of millions on water quality programs. Most
of Puget Sound was “a very healthy body of water,” the marine biologist told the Tacoma
Rotary Club, and in any case “far cleaner” than when she was a child. “Puget Sound, if left
alone, will flush itself,” Dixy declared. “If you start disturbing the bottom, all you do is mix it
up and spread the pollution around a wider area. …The main thing is to stop pouring things
into it.”
* * *
In January of 1986, Amos Reed, with the governor at his side, announced he was
retiring at the age of 70 after five years as head of Corrections. In the three years before
Reed took control of what he described as a “filthy jungle,” there had been 15 murders
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