As we begin to look forward, Shift’s Newsmaker Interview is with the president of the 2023 Roanoke Conference Amy Harris.  Those involved in Washington State politics are well-aware of Harris as she led the record-breaking fundraising effort for the Tiffany Smiley for U.S. Senate campaign and directed the fundraising for the House Republican Caucus.  Previously, Harris was part of the team that elected Dan Newhouse to the U.S. House of Representatives from Central Washington’s 4^th Congressional District in 2014 and then served in the Congressman’s Washington, D.C. office.

The 2023 Roanoke Conference will take place January 27 – 29 in beautiful Ocean Shores in Grays Harbor. This is the largest annual gathering of right-leaning elected officials, policy makers, college students and grassroots activists in the Pacific Northwest. This will be the 14^th annual conference. In her interview, Harris informs us who will be the Friday evening keynote speaker (the Saturday speaker will be announced soon) and what we can expect from the many interesting panels the Roanoke Conference Board is currently putting together. We also ask Harris to comment on her experience on the Smiley campaign and what we might expect from the candidate in the future. (Please click to read full Newsmaker interview)

Washington State Democrat Party Chair Tina Podlodowski is being criticized for her threats to cut-off party financial support to any candidate or party organization that not only endorsed Independent Secretary of State candidate Julie Anderson, but even agreed to meet with her.  It appears the divisive party chair was successful in forcing Democrat Speaker of the House Laurie Jinkins to temper her endorsement of Anderson.

The Chair of the House Democrat campaign committee Representative Joe Fitzgibbon recently stated that Chair Podlodowski threatened to cut off all financial resources to all state house candidates because Speaker Jinkins endorsed her fellow Pierce County elected official Anderson  (who is the Pierce County Auditor) against Democrat Steve Hobbs.  While Representative Fitzgibbon called  Chair Podlodowski’s actions “really inappropriate,” it appears that Jinkins caved in to the party chair’s demands. She pulled her name from the host committee for an Anderson fundraiser and her name is not listed on Anderson’s endorsement page.

Local party officials said that Chair Podlodowski made threats of withdrawing “access to resources and support” if Anderson were allowed to meet with their groups.

At first, Chair Podlodowski denied to a reporter that she made these threats. Later, when she was shown screengrabs of her emails in which she did make the threats, Podlodowski changed her answer to say she never carried through with such threats.

This is yet another example of the extremism which has taken over the Democrat party and how the rest of the party caves into their demands.  Chair Podlodowski supported extreme activists Nicole Thomas-Kennedy (who praised those who set fire to government buildings and told police to “eat COVID-lace shit) for Seattle City Attorney yet forbids anyone who obtains financial assistance from the state party to even meet with a moderate liberal like Julie Anderson. If a Republican party chair were to demand conformity to extreme positions, the media would be contacting all elected GOP officials to find out if they support the chair’s tactics. Yet, since this is the Democrats, we should not expect similar treatment from the media. (Axios, Julie Anderson campaign website, Tina Podlodowski Twitter, and  NTKforCrime website

The new Washington State Ferry terminal at Seattle’s Coleman Dock opened to the public today.  After five years of construction and $467 million in taxpayer money, the terminal will provide access to ferries going from Seattle to Bremerton and Bainbridge Island. This will provide some comfort to the passengers who will be forced to sit at the terminal for hours due to cancelled sailings because Governor Inslee’s COVID vaccine mandate for state employees left the ferry system short staffed and unable to provide enough certified crew members to sail a vessel across Puget Sound. (Seattle Times and Kitsap Sun)

Since Washington Democrats want to play the vocabulary game that their income tax on capital gains is an “excise tax” to get around the state constitutional roadblock against income tax, the Internal Revenue Service has initially decided it will NOT allow Washington State residents to deduct it from their federal income taxes as is allowed in other states who tax income.  This is not the official stance of the IRS, but it is the current opinion of those who will make the final decision. Thus, if the nine liberal justices on the Washington State Supreme Court chose to ignore a century of legal precedent to overturn a Douglas County Superior Court decision, which ruled that the tax was unconstitutional since it taxed income, then Washington residents will be penalized further by not being able to deduct their state payment from their federal income tax. The Washington State Supreme Court will hear arguments on the appeal of the Douglas County Court’s ruling on January 26^th.  (Jason Mercier Facebook)

The Inslee administration’s failure to reduce the large backup of suspected criminals who need mental health treatment has already cost state’s taxpayers $98 million.  While the governor is hobnobbing with wealthy environmentalist in Egypt at COP27, more than 900 people are awaiting competency evaluation or restoration treatment at either Western State Hospital in Steilacoom or Eastern State Hospital in Medicine Lake.  Most are sitting in local jails and the courts are fining the state between $500 to $1,500 a day for the delay in treatment.  One prisoner was released from the Clark County jail because of the delay and has since been arrested and accused of murdering an Idaho couple. (KNKX Radio News and Vancouver Columbian)

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) made a $9.4 million budgeting mistake, and they want Seattle taxpayers to pay for it.  The KCRHA failed to include funding for 12 projects which were funded in 2022 from a one-time federal pandemic relief package in the $88 million they are asking from the city.  Now that the KCRHA realized its serious mistake, they are asking the city to increase its allocation to the KCRHA to fund these 12 projects.  We should note that the $88 million that Mayor Bruce Harrell included in his budget proposal for the KCRHA is $19 million more than what the city provided in its 2022 budget as the new agency seeks to increase.  Also, the City of Seattle is already facing a $34 million deficit in its 2023 budget.

Mayor Harrell justified his original $19 million increase to KCRHA by stating they are already seeing success (without providing examples).  Yet when KOMO News recently asked city officials for examples of what has been accomplished with all the money taxpayers have given to help the homeless, the officials could not come up with specific examples except to point to the creation of the KCRHA.

It is not clear why so many people who obviously took part in the internal KCRHA budgetary process missed such an obvious mistake.  It was well known by many that much of the authority’s funding came from the federal COVID bailout package, which was a one-time allocation. The appears to be no accountability for the mistake and KCRHA CEO Marc Dones said his solution for making sure additional large mistake aren’t made in the future will be to increase the size (and cost) of the authority’s bureaucracy by hiring more people in its budgeting team. (Seattle Times and KOMO News)

KIRO Radio host Dave Ross writes that it is “embarrassing” that city and state officials refuse to do anything about the mass of graffiti that lines the tunnels on the Mercer Street ramps with I-5 in Seattle.  Ross states that it is “like being trapped in a New York City subway men’s room. An elongated, unmaintained New York City subway men’s room.”  Painting over it doesn’t work since the graffiti artist will use it as a new canvas. Ross recommends putting up fake vegetation which block the walls. (MyNorthwest)

A severe drop in voter turnout in Eastern Washington is troubling for moderates and conservatives.  It used to be that turnout was higher in Eastern Washington than it was on the western side of the state.  But that trend appears to have been reversed. Adams, Asotin, Benton, Douglas, Franklin, Grant, Spokane, Stevens, Walla Walla, and Yakima all rank in the bottom 12 counties for turnout in the 2022 mid term elections.  Only the small population counties Columbia, Garfield, Klickitat, and Lincoln are in the top ten for turnout. Yakima Counties turnout was 12% lower than what it was in the 2018 midterm election. (Crosscut and Washington Secretary of State voter turnout report)

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