booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

A pre-inaugural poll by The Seattle Times found that 71 percent of the respondents
expected Gardner to be either excellent or good at managing state government. Sixty-one
percent also gave his leadership qualities high marks. Women tended to rate him higher
than men.
* * *
On January 16, 1985, William Booth Gardner became the governor of a state that
was slowly emerging from a crippling recession, with unemployment lingering at nearly 9
percent. The forest products industry was hemorrhaging jobs. Slade Gorton and Dan Evans,
who had succeeded Washington’s gold dust twins, Scoop Jackson and Warren G. “Maggie”
Magnuson, in the U.S. Senate, were warning that the Office of Management & Budget’s
plans to boost the Bonneville Power Administration’s interest payments and accelerate its
debt repayment could shutter aluminum mills and other heavy users of industrial power
and usher in a regional depression. The state and the cities ringing Puget Sound were
facing a costly federal mandate to reduce sewage contamination. One bright spot was
Boeing, which expected to hire 3,000 more workers in the next 12 months.
Booth labored over his inaugural address, doing most of his writing and editing in a
small room off the library in the Temple of Justice. He was making changes right up to the
moment it had to go to the state printer.
“Nearly 200,000 of our citizens who want work cannot find it,” the governor told
a joint session of the Legislature. “Much of our abundant agricultural harvest has no
market. … Overfishing and poor management have vastly depleted our salmon resources
…Pollution threatens our shellfish harvests. Roads, bridges and public buildings are in
critical need of repair at a time when our revenue base simply will not permit us to address
all our needs. And many people have lost confidence in the ability of our public schools
and institutions of higher learning to provide quality education. … I want to achieve
excellence at all levels and in every classroom of our K12 and higher education systems. …
The challenges we face are difficult, but difficulty is an excuse that history never accepts.
And we do have the chance – a golden opportunity – to make history …. History lies in
transforming Washington into the Gateway of the Future.”
He set four priorities. The first was to develop a diversified, cutting-edge economy
that would make it possible to achieve a host of other goals. In the meantime, services
necessary to help the needy had to be sustained and “the practice of pushing our problems
into the future and onto the shoulders of our children” must end, “whether the subject is
pensions or repairs to our infrastructure.” Rainy days were inevitable, he said, emphasizing
that the state needed a budget reserve large enough to “absorb unanticipated drops in
revenue without having to resort to session after session and service cut after service cut
to balance the budget.”
Gardner next took a moment “to talk directly to my fellow state employees. In the
weeks since the election, I’ve spent a good deal of time observing your work first hand.
90