Goldy

As a gardener, there are a lot of irritating things about Seattle’s weather, but our mild temperatures ain’t one of ’em. We’re already eating fresh lettuce, arugula and radishes out of the garden, and we’ll be enjoying peas, raspberries, herbs and more in another month.  Tomatoes are always a challenge, but that makes them all the more enjoyable.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful Spring day, so shut down your computer and go enjoy it.  And call your mother.

Okay, so… let me get this straight.  The Seattle Times has long editorialized against building light rail “because it would cost so much and do so little.”  But now that East Link has been approved by voters, against their repeated objections, they’re embracing as “creative” and “innovative” the most expensive route through Bellevue?

THE Eastside has emerged as a strong, enthusiastic proponent of light rail, joining innovative ideas and long-range visions of the region’s development, making civic leaders’ call for a tunnel under downtown Bellevue worth serious consideration.

Sound Transit officials estimate a tunnel would add between $500 million to $600 million to the overall cost of the regional transit expansion between downtown Seattle and downtown Redmond. The added cost shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nor should it be discounted as economically out of reach.

I am soooo confused.

Over on Slog, Paul Constant remarks on how sadly difficult it is for conservative critics like the execrable Jonah Goldberg to put  politics aside and just enjoy Star Trek for what is, and it reminded me of my only real conversation with Michael Medved.

We were chatting about holiday films, and while we both agreed that it was beautifully animated, it turns out we equally hated the film Happy Feet.  Medved, who of course originally made his name as a movie reviewer, went on and on about the film’s preachy, environmental message, complaining about the unproven science of global warming, and how the movie distorted facts to its young audience. I, who made my name as a political crackpot, complained about the movie’s boring, meandering, and disjointed script.

It turns out that Medved hated Happy Feet because of its message, while I just hated it because it was a crappy movie.  Huh.

Speaking of performance audits, somebody should conduct one on the Seattle Times editorial board, who in the absence of competition from the Seattle P-I, seems all the more eager to just make stuff up as they go along.

The authority for performance audits was created by the people, through initiative. Legislators did not do it, and were never going to do it. Key legislators did not want to elevate Sonntag into a power that could affect their programs.

Yeah, but the problem is, the Legislature did pass performance audit legislation back in 2005, by a 75-22 margin in the House, 30-19 in the Senate, some three months before I-900 even qualified for the ballot.  And while it didn’t give the State Auditor the autocratic control and dedicated funding source of I-900, Brian Sonntag and his office enthusiastically supported the bill at the time, testifying on its behalf.

I know.  So did I.

Quibble if you want over the details of which legislation was more effective—one that gave the Auditor sole discretion over which agency gets audited, or one that has the priorities and agenda set by a Citizens Advisory Board—the Legislature did in fact give up JLARC’s control over performance audits, and it did so by an overwhelming margin.

Furthermore, the very notion that performance audits would never take place without a dedicated funding source and an all powerful Auditor, totally ignores reality.  Indeed, 23 performance audits were conducted at WSDOT alone, between 1991 and I-900’s passage in 2005.  23!

Performance Audits at WSDOT: Inventory (as of April 2005)

• Washington State Ferries (WSF) Vessel Construction Audit, Booz Allen, 1991
• Environmental Organization Study, WSDOT, Transportation Commission, 1994
• Environmental Cost Savings and Permit Coordination Study, Legislative Transportation Committee, 1994
• Procurement Audit WSF, Federal Audit, 1995
• Department of Transportation Highways and Rail Programs Performance Audit, Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC), 1998
• Department of Transportation Ferry System Performance Audit, JLARC, 1998
• Public Private Initiatives Audit, Transportation Commission, 1999
• WSF Risk Assessment, Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation 1999
• Standards Review Team Report to Governor Locke, Transportation Commission, 2000
• Triennial Review WSF, Federal Audit, 2000
• Performance Audit of the Washington State Ferry System Capital Program, Office of Financial Management, 2001
• Washington State Legislature’s Joint Task Force on Ferries, 2001
• Washington State Ferry System Capital Program, OFM-Talbot, 2002
• WSDOT Aviation Division Study, JLARC, August, 2002
• Statewide Agency Capital Construction Practices (limited scope performance audit), OFM – KPMG, January, 2003
• Statewide Agency Performance Assessment, OFM-KPMG, January, 2003
• Personal Services and Purchased Services Contracting, (limited scope performance audit), OFM, January, 2003
• Department of Transportation Highways and Ferries Programs Performance Measure Review , TPAB-Dye Management Inc (November 2004)
• Department of Transportation Capital Project Management Pre-audit, TPAB-JLARC: Gannet-Fleming (January 2005)
• Environmental Permitting for Transportation Projects Pre-audit, TPAB-JLARC (January 2005)
• Business Process Review of Environmental Permitting for Transportation Projects, TPAB-JLARC; currently underway, April 2005
• Business Process Review of Accountability Oversight Mechanisms and Project Reporting for WSDOT TPAB-JLARC, April 2005
• Review of Port Angeles Graving Dock Project TPAB-JLARC; planned as of April 2005

And those are just the pre-900 performance audits at a single state agency; that list doesn’t include the regular (but much less sexy) financial audits that have always been the primary responsibility of the State Auditor’s Office.  Which raises another serious question about the Times editorial and the media coverage of this issue in general:  if the Times actually understands the difference between a “performance audit” and a “financial audit,” they don’t seem willing to share that information with their readers.

They may both have the word “audit” in their name, but performance and financial audits are not the same thing.  The latter is an objective endeavor conducted according to commonly accepted accounting standards.  If a financial audit finds that there is $90 million missing on the books, somebody surely needs to be fired and/or prosecuted.

But a performance audit is a much more subjective, complex and less exact affair that may include the following elements:

(i) Identification of programs and services that can be eliminated, reduced, consolidated, or enhanced;

(ii) Identification of funding sources to the state agency, to programs, and to services that can be eliminated, reduced, consolidated, or enhanced;

(iii) Analysis of gaps and overlaps in programs and services and recommendations for improving, dropping, blending, or separating functions to correct gaps or overlaps;

(iv) Analysis and recommendations for pooling information technology systems used within the state agency, and evaluation of information processing and telecommunications policy, organization, and management;

(v) Analysis of the roles and functions of the state agency, its programs, and its services and their compliance with statutory authority and recommendations for eliminating or changing those roles and functions and ensuring compliance with statutory authority;

(vi) Recommendations for eliminating or changing statutes, rules, and policy directives as may be necessary to ensure that the agency carry out reasonably and properly those functions vested in the agency by statute;

(vii) Verification of the reliability and validity of agency performance data, self-assessments, and performance measurement systems as required under RCW 43.88.090;

(viii) Identification of potential cost savings in the state agency, its programs, and its services;

(ix) Identification and recognition of best practices;

(x) Evaluation of planning, budgeting, and program evaluation policies and practices;

(xi) Evaluation of personnel systems operation and management;

(xii) Evaluation of state purchasing operations and management policies and practices; and

(xiii) Evaluation of organizational structure and staffing levels, particularly in terms of the ratio of managers and supervisors to nonmanagement personnel.

A thorough financial audit requires an accountant, but to achieve its intended goal a performance audit requires professionals with some degree of familiarity and expertise in the functions being audited (that’s why, lacking such broad expertise in house, Sonntag contracts out performance audits to private firms), and perhaps most importantly, the full cooperation of the agency being audited.

Did a performance audit really uncover $90 million in wasteful spending at the Port of Seattle?  Maybe. Hell, knowing the way the Port had been run, the auditors likely even missed a lot of potential savings.  But these findings aren’t worth much more than a bullet point in a slanted editorial if the target agency perceives the audit as an adversarial process, and thus resists both the auditors and their recommendations.

Oh… and as for this hypocritical piece of tired, old rhetoric:

Under cover of recession, they have now erased the people’s vote on Initiative 900 and hobbled the auditor’s office.

The Times has no problem defunding the teachers pay and class size initiatives, and has advocated in favor of gutting I-937’s overwhelmingly popular renewable energy requirements.  But “the people’s vote on Initiative 900” should somehow be inviolable?  Gimme a fucking break.

I don’t see the Times shedding even crocodile tears for the tens of thousands of Washingtonians who will be denied basic health care under the recently passed draconian budget, or for the thousands of students who now won’t find a slot in our state colleges and universities.  But force Sonntag to put off for a couple years yet another audit of Sound Transit, and we get an editorial crying for Gov. Gregoire to whip out her veto pen.

Personally, I’m a big supporter of performance audits.  I blogged extensively on the subject in 2005, and slogged down to Olympia to testify on their behalf.  (I also blogged and testified on behalf of performance audits for tax exemptions, a good government measure the Times couldn’t give a shit about.)  But unlike the Times, I understand their limits.

Budgets are all about priorities.  And if Sonntag really believes that investing in education or preventative health care produces less of a long term financial return to the state than investing in performance audits, he should save up his pennies and conduct the next performance audit on himself.

When I started obsessively plugging a high-earners income tax during the last session, I was publicly and privately informed that I was absolutely nuts.  Washington state voters would never approve an income tax in any form, I was told, and so it was futile, if not downright counterproductive, to even attempt to start the conversation.  One state lawmaker even went so far as to privately congratulate me for cementing my reputation as a “political crackpot.”

Well… if I’m a crackpot, it looks like I’m not the only one, for in an unsigned editorial today in The Olympian, our state capital’s paper of record takes up the challenge, warning that “Hesitance to rethink taxes will bite lawmakers.”

The need for tax reform is long overdue.

That effort has to come from Gov. Chris Gregoire and legislative leaders. They simply must engage the public in a constructive conversation about this state’s overreliance on property and sales taxes and how the missing third leg of the stool — an income tax — is necessary to level out the revenue peaks and valleys that this state constantly experiences.

Of course, one way to effectively start this conversation would be to use the coming special session to put a high-earners income tax on the November ballot.  Some might call that a crackpot idea.  I prefer to think of it as leadership.

University of Washington faculty members may be organized, but they’re not unionized, a circumstance that may change in the wake of deep budget and program cuts at our state’s premier university.

As you set about making drastic cuts to the programs you have worked so hard to build and maintain, the thought may cross your mind: However we are advocating for the UW in Olympia now, has failed. AAUP-UW invites you to consider whether and how a unionized UW faculty could be a stronger voice, not only for ourselves, but for the institution to which we are so committed.

That was from American Association of University Professors UW Chapter President Janelle Taylor, in an email inviting members to attend a panel discussion, “Faculty Unionization: Does It Make Sense for Us?”, next Tuesday, 4:30PM at the UW Club.  Panelists will include Prof. Lisa Klein of Rutgers University, and Prof. William Lyne of Western Washington University, “both of whom have extensive experience with faculty unionization.”

The message I keep hearing from university faculty is that it takes years and years, and a substantial financial investment, to build a successful academic program… but it only takes a single stroke of a red ink to destroy it.  No wonder resistance to unionization appears to be wearing thin in the face of unprecedented cuts.

The Franklin County Republican Central Committee censured State Rep. Maureen Walsh (R-16) on Tuesday, for her vote in favor of HB 1727, the recently signed domestic partnership bill.  A party press release accuses Walsh of “stripping traditional marriage of its meaning,” and gives official “NOTICE” that she no longer represents “the values of the Franklin County Republican Party.”

But what really happened at Tuesday’s FCRCC meeting?  Jimmy at McCranium reports:

Once source tells me it was more like mob rule than a meeting when a group consisting largely of evangelicals led by Nicole Prasch and Brenda High (complete with a area representative from Focus on the Family) pressured for a censure vote (Ok… censure… exactly what does that even accomplish?).

This isn’t good for Franklin County moderate Republicans who like many others, are increasingly coming around to the understanding that civil unions are not the great threat (or the best platform issue) they had been led to believe.

Looks like that Republican big tent just got a little smaller.

A few days back I suggested that newspaper publishers should take personal responsibility for their own bad business decisions, arguing that as poor as industry fundamentals may be, it’s the mountain of highly leveraged debt, not operating losses, that threatens to crush many of our daily newspapers.  And as an example, I pointed to two of Washington’s most prominent struggling dailies.

While the whole industry is struggling, the financial precariousness of some of our most threatened papers is at least partially due to the awful business decisions of their owners, in particular, the incredibly over-leveraged position they find themselves in as a result of ill-advised acquisitions and other bone-headed ventures.

For The Columbian, it was the construction of a new $40 million office tower that landed a shrunken newsroom back in its old digs, and publisher Scott Campbell in bankruptcy court.  For The Times, it was Frank Blethen’s ill-fated foray into the Maine media market that has left him with a couple hundred million dollars of debt coming due, and no obvious means of raising more capital.  Both papers are currently losing money on their daily operations, but neither would be struggling to survive this particular recession if the bankers weren’t pounding at their doors.

As usual, my trolls took issue with my analysis, arguing that I was bucking conventional wisdom simply to take another potshot at my friends at The Seattle Times. Uh-huh. So I’m guessing they’ll probably be disappointed to read the unsigned editorial in today’s Times, that picks up on my basic premise in arguing that the bankruptcy of the Columbian is “different” than that of debt-laden giants like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Los Angeles Times:

Like every newspaper, the Columbian’s advertising revenue has been whacked by the recession. Unlike larger companies such as Philadelphia and Tribune, the Columbian’s push into Chapter 11 does not stem from a debt-laden purchase of newspapers.

The Campbell family, three-generation owners of the Columbian, took on debt to help revitalize downtown Vancouver by constructing a new building. The newspaper quickly moved back to its old building because of the recession. Now Bank of America is calling in its loan of about $17 million — a pittance compared to what other newspaper companies owe.

What makes the Columbian’s plight so sad is that Southwest Washington could lose its dominant news provider because Bank of America is apparently not willing to work with the company. This is a newspaper that in ordinary times would be doing well and will likely do well after the recession.

Forget for a moment the Times’ effort to spin the Campbell’s ill-fated real estate speculation as an act of civic engagement; what’s important here is that The Times acknowledges my core thesis… that it is debt, not operating losses, that threatens both the Columbian and its larger cousins.  The Times also confirms that it was the construction of its new/old headquarters that ultimately pushed the Columbian into bankruptcy, not the Great Recession, or the fundamental weakness of the newspaper industry itself.

Of course, what we don’t see from the Times is a mention of their own poor business decisions, or an admission that they and their friends at the Columbian should take any personal responsibility for the current sorry state of their respective family businesses.  On the contrary, the Times paints evil, Bank of America as the bogeyman for demanding that the Campbells actually make good on their debt, according to the terms contractually promised.

The Times solution to The Columbian’s mismanagement of their own finances?  Appeal to gov’ment to force BoA to renegotiate the loan.

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing today about the future of journalism. This hearing and the Columbian’s plight should grab the attention of the governor, the state Legislature and our federal delegation.

The time is right for politicians, journalists and the public to start working toward preserving an independent press.

One can’t help but wonder if this is a preview of the arguments the Times will make on its own behalf should it seek bankruptcy protection later this year… that the government should use its bailout accrued leverage to force financial institutions to renegotiate terms with struggling newspapers, in the interest of preserving an independent press?

Irony aside, I’m not necessarily opposed to the government doing exactly that.  It would be a shame to see Southwest Washington lose its only major daily, just as much as it would for Seattle to become our nation’s largest no-newspaper town.

But as a condition of any such government-brokered bailout, I’d want to see a genuine public admission from the likes of the Blethens and the Campbells of their own culpability in their respective paper’s near demise—not out of vindictiveness or a craving for public humiliation, or even the hope that acknowledging their own plight might moderate their editors’ demands for less government and more personal responsibility—but because self awareness is the first step to recovery.  For the most effective thing we can do to prevent newspaper publishers from repeating their own mistakes of the past fifteen years is to force them to admit these mistakes to themselves… something the Times, if today’s bankers-as-villains editorial is any indication, simply isn’t ready to do.

What Ben said, in his thorough fisking of Michael Ennis’s misleading anti-transit guest column in today’s Seattle Times.  (Light rail is going to electrocute the I-90 bridge? I mean, really? Could the folks at the Washington Policy Center get anymore ridiculous?)

And… um… I don’t tell Ennis how to build Enumclaw’s transportation system, so why’s he telling us how to build ours?

I’m with Joel, in that I didn’t agree a whole lot with Jack Kemp.  I freely admit that he and his brand of economic libertarianism were awfully compelling, but I could never buy into the most alluring feature of his Ayn Rand/Chicago School style Reaganomics:  its simplicity.

It was hard for me to believe, as Kemp genuinely did, that tax cuts for the rich would eventually trickle down to the rest of us, and I’m confident in asserting that the past couple decades of an ever widening economic divide have proven my doubts well founded. So why, considering how much I opposed his policies and dreaded his unfulfilled ascendancy, did I not only bother to briefly commemorate his passing, but follow up with this second post?

Yes, as I previously wrote, in light of the GOP’s recent and disastrous collapse, I do view libertarians like Kemp (and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld) as a tremendous missed opportunity for his party to seize upon a potent political theme that could have kept Republicans competitive, if not dominant, for decades to come.  And I’m thankful for their fumble.

But Kemp’s passing also deserves notice because he represented the sort of politician who was rare even in his day, and who is almost entirely absent amongst the leadership of the 21st century Republican Party… one whose policies you can hate, but whose character you can respect.  Perhaps it was his competitive experience as a top athlete, or perhaps it was simply who he was, but unlike many Republicans today, Kemp always seemed able to distinguish between an opponent and an enemy.

I don’t remember Kemp ever attempting to paint Democrats and their supporters as cowards, traitors, terrorists or worse, and so he never earned the type of enmity by example that liberals like me now justly hold for so many of his Republican colleagues. And if more Republicans had followed Kemp’s example in both substance and style, I wonder if his party would be in the dire straits it finds itself in today?

State lawmakers have put a lot of faith in deep-bore technology and the latest advances that, we’re told, will make the Viaduct tunnel possible. But apparently, not too much faith.  That’s why as a condition of providing a couple billion dollars of funding in the recently passed transportation budget, legislators threw in a provision that requires Seattle taxpayers to pull out their checkbooks for any cost overruns.

But you know… what are the chances of that?  Transportation mega-projects always come in on time and on budget, and those giant tunnel boring machines?  They’re as infallible as the Pope.

On Beacon Hill, Christine Miller-Panganiban said she was doing a little gardening in her front yard a couple of Sundays ago, when she noticed a mysterious hole. She stuck her shovel  down. It didn’t feel the bottom.

Her husband got a piece of tubing seven feet long. Still they couldn’t feel the bottom. Only when she looked down it with a flashlight did she find that it went down 21 feet. “Oh my God,” she thought, and more when she realized that suddenly there was a deep void that now only went down and down, but extended under her house.

The hole was apparently created when Sound Transit was boring the tunnel for the new light rail line. On Monday, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray acknowledged the agency has found seven underground voids caused by its boring machine within a couple of blocks east of the future Beacon Hill station, though the one in Miller-Panganiban’s front yard was the only one visible from the surface. Aside from causing concern in the neighborhood, he said testing for them and filling them would cost the agency up to $1 million.Oops. Apparently, the boring machine hit a layer of sand, which flowed into the tunnel leaving a gap in its place.

What kind of gap? “An empty gap,” Sound Transit’s Bruce Gray explains to us laymen.

But let’s not worry about all those boring details. The scientifically minded folks at the Discovery Institute assure us that recent technological advances make it possible to dig the world’s largest diameter deep bore tunnel, straight under downtown Seattle, cheaper, faster and more reliably than ever before possible. So unforeseen and costly technical hurdles — like, you know… sand — couldn’t possibly happen here.

Oh wait… it just did.

Speaking of being out of touch with the will of the people, my occasional KOMO colleague John Carlson has proposed solving our state budget crisis by legalizing slot machines and taxing the profits at 20 percent.

Um… been there, done that, John.  As recently as 2004, Washington state voters broadly rejected I-892’s slot machine measure by a landslide 62 to 38 percent margin, with the initiative failing in 34 of 39 counties.  Under the late Norm Maleng’s leadership, the opposition brought together a coalition so diverse that it found me sitting next to Jeff Kemp at a strategy session, and when you have a tent that big, it’s hard to imagine John effectively working this issue from the outside.

Voters just don’t want slot machines in their neighborhoods.

But there’s one other interesting, if unintentional, point in John’s column, for in talking up casino gambling as an alternative to a sales tax increase or even (gasp) a high-earners income tax, our state’s leading conservative pundit, and one time Republican gubernatorial nominee, appears to all but concede on the question of whether additional revenues are needed.

I opposed casinos and gambling a decade ago but the tribes have made most of my arguments obsolete. The question on the table now is whether the state allows private competition and thereby creates a new revenue source to help our schools and keep down taxes and tuition…

Huh. That sure sounds to me like John is arguing that we actually need a “new revenue source to help our schools and keep down taxes and tuition,” which is a huge departure from Tim Eyman’s I-892, which promised voters a substantial tax cut in exchange for legalizing slot machines.

Welcome to the reality based community, John. Now if only you’d join me in supporting a new revenue source that has a realistic chance of being approved by voters.

Survey USA recently posted the latest results of its Senate approval ratings tracking poll, and Senate Guru has a concise analysis of what the reelection landscape looks like for Washington’s Sen. Patty Murray:

Patty Murray	Jan. ’09	Feb. ’09	Mar. ’09	Apr. ’09
Approve	55	54	54	54
Disapprove	36	37	34	32

Senator Murray’s numbers remain remarkably stable and quite safe with little Republican opposition on the horizon.

I dunno, perhaps after losing her King County Executive race, Susan Hutchison will offer herself up for another beating, this time at the hands of the diminutive Sen. Murray, but for the life of me, I can’t think of any other prominent Republican who might be willing to jump into the race.  Certainly not Dino Rossi, who seems contentedly devoted to making himself some more money. And while I’ve heard rumors that Rep. Dave Reichert might be considering a challenge, I have a hard time believing he’s that stupid.

No, as things stand, the only Republican with a hope of taking down Sen. Murray is State Attorney General Rob McKenna, and I’d be shocked if he isn’t wisely biding his time in preparation for a 2012 run at the governor’s mansion.

Of course, there’s plenty of time for things to change.  The economy could go even further down the toilet, causing voters to blame President Obama and the Democratic Congress.  Or some other disaster, political or otherwise, could strike.

But Sen. Murray has always been a much more adept politician than her opponents have ever acknowledged (publicly, or to themselves,) and to describe WA’s Republican bench as weak is to deceptively imply that the state GOP actually has a bench.  It’s more like a three-legged stool.  With two of its legs missing.

Local R’s sure do enjoy mocking Murray as the dumbest Senator in the other Washington, yet they can’t ever manage to scrape up a credible challenger.  Huh.  I wonder what that says about them?

What an odd editorial.  The headline says “Voters should have a say in how president is elected,” yet the editorial argues against the direct election of the president, and for maintaining the electoral college system that propelled George W. Bush into the White House despite losing the popular vote.

Yeah, I know, what the Seattle Times editorial board says it is saying is that voters here should get a direct vote on whether we want to be part of a national compact assuring that voters here get a direct vote on the presidency. But by pushing for a referendum or initiative to overturn this recently passed legislation, the Times is also arguing against the legislation itself.

This was a big thing done with little public notice, and is disturbing in its implications.

The unsigned editorial’s author doesn’t bother to explain exactly what these disturbing implications are… nor how such a “big thing” slipped by with so “little public notice.”  As VGood astutely observes in the editorial’s comment thread:

So Seattle Times, you have people that cover Olympia, how come this wasn’t given more press in the Times?

Touché, VGood.  Touché.  The Senate bill was introduced in January.  A similar House bill first received a public hearing way back on February 5.  The Times had three months to warn readers about the bill’s disturbing implications… how much more “public notice” do they need?

Personally, I’d rather presidential candidates consider my vote just as important as those from crucial swing states like Ohio and Florida. And if I were an Eastern Washington Republican, I imagine I’d be damn happy to know that my vote for WA’s eleven electors wasn’t made futile by a sea of votes from dirty, Seattle liberals.  Perhaps that explains why an overwhelming 77 percent of Washington voters support National Popular Vote legislation?

But, you know, nobody has their finger on the pulse of the Washington electorate like those populists at the Times, so maybe I have this issue, and the politics surrounding it, completely wrong?