booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

took the edge off the furor. The Times took more heat than the governor, but the scandal
wouldn’t go away. It got worse when Ernie La Palm, Turner’s well respected deputy, was
dismissed at year’s end. La Palm, 56, said he was sacked because they believed he squealed
on his boss. (Eric Nalder, the Times reporter whose stories brought down Turner, said La
Palm was not his source.) The Gardner Administration flatly denied that was why La Palm
was let go. Rather, “considering the revelations and problems in the department,” they
felt it was important for Stoner to appoint his own management team and make “a clean
slate.” La Palm shot back: “That they are now saying there are all these problems in the
department is an interesting observation in light of how Gardner pronounced Isiah Turner
the greatest commissioner in the history of the agency.”
The governor attended farewell events honoring Turner, including a reception that
drew a crowd of 400 to Seattle’s Mount Zion Baptist Church. “This state has lost the best
employment-security director it has ever had,” Booth said. Dick Larsen scathingly hailed it
as a singular duplicitous moment in “Chapter III of the Adventures of Prince Faintheart.”
Also embarrassing was a projected $18 million cost overrun and conflict-of-interest
allegations in connection with ACES, a welfare system computer project at the Department
of Social & Health Services. Its $20 million predecessor, COSMOS, was scrapped in 1989
when caseworkers demonstrated they could compute welfare eligibility by hand about
twice as fast. COSMOS began in the Spellman era, but the twin snafus dogged the Gardner
Administration for the rest of its days. Booth pointed out that the state was actually only
$900,000 into the new system, proof that the agency’s beefed-up oversight was effective.
“Because of COSMOS,” he said, “we caught ACES before the horse left the barn.” Among
those making hay was Sen. McDonald, a likely contender for the GOP nomination for
governor in 1992. Whenever Gannett’s Bob Partlow asked for an update on the computer
projects, he’d begin with “You ran as someone who could manage…” Gardner would cut
him off in mid-sentence, saying, “I know the diatribe.” He was seriously rethinking whether
he could take four more years of this. Nevertheless, a black-tie fundraiser organized by Ron
Dotzauer raised $300,000 for the next campaign, be it a bid for a third term or the U.S.
Senate.
Two former rivals suffered major setbacks that fall. John Spellman attempted
to unseat Gardner’s second Supreme Court appointee, Richard Guy, a former Spokane
Superior Court judge who had strong bipartisan support. Bob Williams, thought to be in a
tight race with Congresswoman Jolene Unsoeld in Southwest Washington’s 3 rd District, was
also soundly defeated.
* * *
Gardner’s last two years as governor were dominated by extraordinarily eventful
legislative sessions and broader responsibilities. He was chairman of the National
Governors Association and a national leader in education reform. As he weighed where
he would be in 1993, he told Jill Severn he was thinking about the challenges of governing
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