Shift’s Newsmaker Interview is with Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward, who is up for re-election after her first term in office. She will be facing Lisa Brown, a liberal career politician and former member of Governor Jay Inslee’s appointed cabinet. In her first race in 2019, Mayor Woodward won by just 848 votes over another liberal career politician, Spokane Council President Ben Stuckart, despite his supporters breaking multiple campaign funding and reporting laws. Lisa Brown had been Gov. Inslee’s Commerce Department Director from early 2019, until she resigned earlier this year the day before she made her official announcement of her campaign for mayor. In 2022, then-Commerce Director Brown had the Washington State taxpayers fund the moving of her government office from Olympia (where the majority of her employees were working) to Spokane seemingly in preparation for this campaign. Read more on Shift.

This sad story from Center Square highlights the dangers of one-party Democrat rule for over a generation in King County – no accountability for failure, so failure is what you get. Just read how the state thinks the good news is “one year and more than $65 million into Washington state’s Right of Way Safety Initiative, nearly 300 homeless people have been moved off state highway rights of way in King County.”

However, the reality is that once you subtract those who remain in emergency housing, or have died, just “86 people have been moved to permanent housing” after the state has closed “encampments in areas around highways.” You can read more about how the “King County Regional Homelessness Authority first began operations under the initiative in June 2022” and has blown through ”$49.2 million to the authority” so far here… Center Square.

It will take you a long time to get through this piece from the state’s largest paper, but the conclusion is easy – the state’s ferry system is broken, and Governor Jay Inslee wants to be as far away from the blame as possible. That’s what you’ll understand after 70 paragraphs, and just a single word four-year-old, self-congratulatory quote from the governor.

The disaster that is the current state of affairs at the Washington State Ferries is defended in the paper by one of the governor’s spokespeople, three far-Left state legislators, and the state’s Director of Vessels, with one legislator noting “Yeah, we’re screwed.” Of course, you can also read how conservative voices warned of the pending disaster of relying on just one politically well-connected contractor (“When you put all your eggs in one basket, or pretty close to one basket, one point of failure poses a huge problem”) here… Seattle Times.

The state’s Attorney General is busy “exploring” a run for governor, but that doesn’t mean his old job doesn’t sometimes get in the way. That certainly was the case when the Olympian reported that a “King County Superior Court judge says the state of Washington must pay attorney’s fees to Value Village months after the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the Attorney General’s Office violated the thrift store chain’s First Amendment rights.”

That’s right, while “Bobbie Sue” is chasing headlines with his latest partisan lawsuit, his office is so far off track that it is having to pay millions to the attorneys forced to fight against the state’s overreach, as “The State’s conduct during this case contributed to increased fees and costs.” You can read about how AG Ferguson was unavailable for comment, and how snippy his spokesperson was, here… The Olympian.

It has seemingly taken awhile, but the Seattle Times editorial board has woken up to the fact that the Seattle City Council may have a spending problem. That’s the news from their lead Sunday editorial, which concludes the “first step on the path to recovery is to acknowledge the consequences of one’s own actions. And at City Hall, it’s simple: Council spent too much.”

The pending disaster which the Times has noticed is that if “Seattle continues to operate at its current level, General Fund spending will outpace revenues by $221 million in 2025 and an additional $207 million the year after.” You can see just how little responsibility the council is willing to accept for their errors, as Council member Lisa Herbold claims “the future budget gap is ‘largely out of our control and the result of structural budget problems’,” here… Seattle Times.

For those with access to the Wall Street Journal, you can read how the city council’s preference for legal drugs is raising attention across the country here… Wall Street Journal.

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