BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

“Booth Gardner is the antithesis of a politician,” House Speaker Joe King told a
reporter. “The process is still difficult for him. I continue to think that’s why the public
likes him so well. He seems like the opposite of a politician – and he is.” On this King
and Jeannette Hayner, the GOP majority leader in the Senate, could agree. She admired
Gardner’s popularity with the voters, “but that doesn’t translate into legislative skill. If it
did, my gosh, he’d be able to do anything.”
“They tried to change Booth Gardner’s image,” said Vito Chiechi, the political
strategist for the House Republicans. “In doing so, they went too far.” Maybe, says Heck,
“but he had to be a player.” Vito got fired the next year. Denny got a raise.
* * *
An income tax was, is and may always be the toughest sell in Washington politics.
Foster recalls seeing a letter Gardner wrote to Norton Clapp defending his plan. “It said,
‘You’ve always taught me to look at the facts. And here’s how I see the facts involving our
budget situation, how we raise money and why the income tax is more equitable.’ I never
saw the answer.”
The Gardner legislative
team – Heck, Foster and
Wilkerson – regrouped. Over the
next three years they pushed
hard for the lawmakers to send
a tax reform plan to the voters.
“Try as we might, we just weren’t
able to get anything passed,”
Foster says. Dan Evans and
Gardner commiserated on that
one, too. Campaigning outside Booth receives the blessing of former U.S. Senator Warren G. “Maggie”
Magnuson in 1989. Gardner family album.
the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill at
Cosmopolis in 1973, Evans offered his hand to a shift worker heading home. “My wife
always votes for you,” the guy said, “but I just want you to know that I’m not voting for any
f***ing income tax!” Seventy-seven percent of the voters agreed with him that year.
* * *
Some important victories in the first year of Gardner’s second term were
overshadowed by the noisy debate over tax reform. Gardner and Gregoire, who quickly
proved to be an aggressive and effective manager at Ecology, goaded the feds into ruling
out Hanford as a repository for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste. They also won a
“Tri-Party” agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S.
Department of Energy that the nuclear waste at Hanford, dating back to the atomic bomb
project in World War II, would be systematically cleaned up over the next 30 years. Old
waste tanks were perilously close to the Columbia River aquifer. The governor also banned
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