BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

poles. After a couple of hours, the worker said, “Mr. Gardner, if you don’t mind, I think I
can do this quicker without your help.” Booth took the performance review in stride. The
job was not as easy as it looked. He leaned against the truck and they chatted away while
the worker got on with it. When he got back to the office, his secretary said she’d fielded
a call from an irate taxpayer who insisted on speaking only with the county executive.
Booth returned the call. “My mother is elderly,” the man told him, “so I picked her up to
go grocery shopping and we passed one of your trucks in Lakewood. There was one guy
working and the other guy was just standing there.” “Was the guy who was just standing
there wearing a red flannel shirt?” “Yeah, that’s the one. Do you know him?” “Yes I do,”
Booth said, stifling a chuckle. “ I’ll talk to him and his boss.”
Winsley has heard the story many times but still laughs. “I look at Booth as being
the right person at the right time for that new job. He had a positive attitude from the
very beginning. I’m not sure anyone else could have accomplished so much in such a short
period of time. Instead of coming in with some big agenda, his approach was to take it
one step at a time,” streamline county operations, get it back in the black and win the
confidence of the people who voted for change.
Larry Faulk was also impressed. “I think he did a great job because he brought
in a whole new way of thinking,” Faulk said in 2009. Although their personalities are
dramatically different, both delight in irony and hate political pettiness. When Spellman’s
nomination of Faulk to the State Pollution Control Hearings Board was bottled up in a
legislative committee in 1982, Booth called his friend Ted Bottiger, the Senate majority
leader, and got Faulk confirmed. “Classy,” says Faulk.
* * *
Adele Ferguson was the first to tell the whole state who Booth was. Her columns
were syndicated in dailies and weeklies in every corner of the state. On April 30, 1982,
readers from Port Angeles to Pullman read this: “Booth Gardner. Remember the name.
He could be your next governor. If a lot of anxious Democrats desperately appraising the
quality of the other prospects in the field so far have their way he will be.
“The 45-year-old Tacoma millionaire has been Pierce County executive for only
eight months but, facing a $4.6 million county debt when he took office, he has already
whittled that down to $3.1 million. He asked county employees to forgo wage increases for
a year, and then to accept a 1.1 percent increase. He’d rather keep people working than
have to lay off to afford raises …
“He checked up on the more than 300 vehicles the county owns, other than service
trucks, etc., and learned that more than 60 percent of them were being driven home by
employees nights and weekends. He put a halt to that, including some usage by deputy
sheriffs, who didn’t like that one bit. …
“He made a lot of other changes, some resulting in savings of small amounts of
money, ‘but you save $15,000 here and $15,000 there and pretty soon you’re saving
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