booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Its centerpiece –“play or pay”– was the most controversial part. Businesses that didn’t
provide employees with health insurance would be assessed $138 per month per worker
to create a fund to cover the uninsured. To his disadvantage, Gardner’s own 17-member
Health Care Commission was still undecided about “play or pay” after 12 months of study.
Its report wasn’t due until year’s end.
Speaker King’s Democrats delivered a plan the governor could live with. McDonald’s
Republicans stonewalled it in the Senate. Booth was furious, particularly with Jim West,
the tight-fisted senator from
Spokane who headed the
Health Care Committee.
West brusquely denied his
request for a bipartisan
negotiating team from both
houses. “The public needs
to keep the heat on the
Republicans,” the governor
said. “The people must make
sure their voices are heard
over those of the insurance
companies and the medical
industry…”
The 1992 session
marked the rise of a new
star for the Democrats, Gary
Locke of Seattle, who headed the House Appropriations Committee. Hard to peg, then and
in the years to come when he became a two-term governor, Locke’s supplemental budget
proposal cut 1,800 state jobs but restored 3-percent raises for the teachers and the other
survivors. Booth was peeved. No one had asked him for advice or consent. If they had, he
would have said the Locke plan was calculated to make things even worse come 1993.
McDonald upped the ante by proposing to cut 3,600 state employees. At the
same time, he wanted to give the teachers a 3.6 percent raise. The others would get
zero. The new Growth Management plan lost much of its funding. The rainy day fund was
unmolested. It’s “fiscal chaos,” the governor fumed. On this Locke agreed, pronouncing
McDonald’s plan “heartless, unfair and unwise.”
They adjourned in March with a weary whimper. The teachers and other state
employees emerged with a 3 percent raise. Some 2,000 jobs were to be cut, most by attrition.
The rainy day fund was reduced by $160 million. (Locke wryly observed that it wasn’t
raining.) Health care remained unhealthy. Booth used his veto to restore funding for growth
management planning and programs to benefit low-income mothers and their children.
Booth at the legendary annual Pacific County Democrats Crab Feed in 1991. State
Senator Sid Snyder is at right, Congresswoman Jolene Unsoeld at left.
©The Daily World (Aberdeen, WA) 1991 Reprinted with permission.
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