booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Booth meets with members of his staff. Standing from left, the governor, press secretary Jim Kneeland, press aide Jim
Richards and policy adviser Laird Harris; sitting, chief of staff Dean Foster. Wayne Zimmerman ©The News Tribune
(Tacoma, WA) 1985 Reprinted with permission.
Smith was named to head the Office of Financial Management, while Shinpoch was
turned loose on the Department of Revenue. Richard A. Davis, a highly regarded executive
with Pacific Northwest Bell, was commissioned to unravel the rat’s nest of problems at
Labor & Industries. Its convoluted, money-losing worker’s compensation program was
derided by both business and labor and targeted by Gardner during the campaign. Davis
quickly named Joe Dear, the 33-year-old chief lobbyist for the State Labor Council, to serve
as temporary assistant director. Dear’s job was to transform Vocational Rehabilitation from
chaos to a reasonable facsimile of efficiency. He became a star.
Joining Dean Foster as key internal staffers were Harris as policy adviser, Kneeland
as press secretary and Terry Sebring, Gardner’s trusted legal adviser from Pierce County, as
the governor’s attorney.
The appointment of Bellevue City Manager Andrea Beatty to head the Department
of Ecology proved controversial. The 39-year-old was a total unknown to the environmental
community, which had done a lot of soul-searching before deciding to back Booth over
McDermott. Her defenders praised her as “a fast study” and a skilled manager. Smith
acknowledged that her lack of environmental chops represented a risk, but he said the
governor wasn’t interested in conventional wisdom. (Beatty, later Andrea Riniker, came
to be known as “The Velvet Hammer” as Ecology came down hard on heavy industry,
including Weyerhaeuser. Beatty’s successor in 1988 was an intensely bright deputy
attorney general, Christine Gregoire.)
Agricultural interests were surprised and disappointed when Gardner bounced
Spellman appointee Keith Ellis from the Department of Agriculture. Alan Pettibone, acting
dean of the College Of Agriculture at Washington State University, got the job. Richard
Thompson, Puyallup’s city manager, who had worked closely with Gardner in Pierce
County, was named director of the Community Development Agency. Dick Virant, a former
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