It took Governor Jay Inslee only 10 years to double the size of the state government he hijacked in 2013, pushing the two-year spending plan over $60 billion. Now, according to a deep analysis from the Washington State Standard, he wants to distract voters from his policy failures and tax increases with an unprecedented off-year spending spree before he leaves office, demanding the legislature “boost state spending by nearly $2.5 billion in the next 18 months.”

The governor is clearly trying to spend all the money in the state’s accounts with his $70+ billion proposal, so that his fellow Democrats can plead poverty in November when begging voters not to repeal their new carbon tax and state income tax. He does his best to distract the media and voters by suggesting they just skip over any questions about his budget scheme because “(T)here are some numbers attached to it but these numbers aren’t important.”

Read on to find other things Inslee finds unimportant, like transportation, with the governor “offering no suggestions on how the state should deal with soaring costs to build new ferries and freeways and remove salmon-blocking culverts” here… Washington State Standard.

Shift will leave this emerging Seattle Times story with little comment, so as not to rile up any ferry riders out there who voted for Jay Inslee, as “Washington State Ferries is slowly restoring its electronic fare collection system after a systemwide outage early Thursday.”

Normally Democrat elected officials don’t care much about collecting fares for providing taxpayer-funded transportation (see Sound Transit), but for ferries they try to grab cash, but they hate it when it adds work like today as “ferry staff must hand record each transaction to be entered into the electronic system later, a slow process likely to cause delays.” Read on to see how this is yet another Inslee administration effort which “is under investigation” here… Seattle Times.

The Let’s Go Washington effort to qualify six policy initiatives to the legislature has been a frequent topic for Shift this year. That effort reached the halfway mark, according to KING 5, as “supporters of a police pursuit initiative announced Thursday it has received enough signatures for the 2024 ballot.”

Over 400,000 signatures were turned into the state for Initiative 2113, despite the “American Civil Liberties Union of Washington (which) campaigned against the initiative” because they know better how police should do their job. You can read on how this initiative follows on similar numbers of signatures being turned in supporting parental rights and to repeal the carbon tax here… Shift, KING 5.

Voters in the sprawling Sixth Congressional District, which covers the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas, and a bit of Tacoma, are getting another candidate who lives in the district, and the first one from the Republican side. That’s according to Crosscut, which writes that “State Sen. Drew MacEwen has officially joined the race for the 6th Congressional District seat that will be vacated by outgoing U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer.”

The Democrat picked by Rep. Kilmer to be his replacement is from Seattle, State Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, though two other liberals who live outside the big city, but inside the district, have entered the race.  Sen. MacEwen, of Shelton, is “a U.S. Navy veteran, (and) has been in the state Senate since January 2023”, after a decade in the state House… Crosscut.

Shift has written before about how state and local government employee unions really hate the idea of any transparency in their contract negotiations, where voters could see how often their Democrat elected officials are sitting on the same side of the bargaining table as the union bosses who give them campaign cash. See if you also find it ironic that the union publication In These Times was attacking Starbucks for demanding in-person contract negotiations, as “Starbucks continued to reject the idea of hybrid negotiations” which allows people the union chooses to join the negotiations via Zoom, here… Shift, In These Times.

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