Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland got a scare Tuesday. A tunnel at the site partially collapsed. The incident prompted a brief evacuation of the immediate area while officials assessed the danger. 4,800 workers sheltered indoors for several hours.

The situation even prompted something most unexpected: Gov. Jay Inslee saying something nice about Donald Trump’s White House. “I appreciate that the White House reached out to my office to alert us,” Inslee said in a statement. Will wonders never cease?

While we’re talking Hanford…

As long as we’re on the subject: Where has the leadership been from the state’s “leading” Democrats on building long-term storage for Hanford’s nuclear wastes?

Washington was proud to do its part to help win WWII, including our massive shipyard and Boeing airplane production. Our state also produced the first weapon-ready fissionable material at the secret Hanford complex. Unfortunately, that has saddled our state with a clean-up at Hanford that has lasted decades and continues to be behind schedule.

Leading Democrats like Jay Inslee and senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell can be counted on to put out press releases urging an accelerated clean-up schedule at Hanford. They’ll speak up for Hanford worker safety.

But Hanford’s clean-up requires a lot more than just a press release. We need a permanent national repository for legacy wastes. On that, their leadership has been less than stellar.

Washington needs Yucca

In the early 1980s, Congress passed a law requiring a permanent national depository be built for nuclear wastes. In 1987, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was chosen to be that site. Since that time, billions of dollars have been spent studying and readying Yucca.

We spoke with Conservatives for Environmental Reform, an environmental PAC from Seattle, Washington focused on “a conservative approach to environmental protection[s]“, and they agree: “The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository is a necessity to safely dispose of the toxic nuclear waste from the Hanford Site. Failure to store the waste jeopardizes the Columbia River–an important part of the $2.7 billion Washington state generates from commercial and sport fishing each year.”

But Yucca had one implacable foe: former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada). Reid thwarted Yucca’s progress at every turn, gutting its funding and packing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with opponents of the project.

Reid struck a grand bargain with the Obama administration on Yucca, with the president appointing Reid’s lackeys to the NRC and basically giving up on the project. That’s when we really needed Washington’s Congressional Democrats standing up to their fellow party members and pushing to make Yucca a reality.

The meek: Inslee, Murray, Cantwell

Is that what happened? No. Inslee, Murray, and Cantwell continued to say they favored Yucca, but they didn’t push back on Reid and Obama and fight for our state’s interests.

When Inslee’s friend, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), stuck up for Reid’s disastrous choice for NRC chairman, Jay Inslee said nothing. When Murray served in the Senate leadership with Reid, she maintained near-radio silence on Yucca matters. She only found the courage to speak up when it was clear Reid was on his way out.

And Cantwell? Well, she stuck to her usual policy of saying as little as possible about anything.

We need political leaders who will fight for Washington’s interests, not just sit back and hope it all turns out OK. When it comes to permanent storage for Hanford’s wastes, that’s a fight Jay Inslee, Patty Murray, and Maria Cantwell chose to avoid.

Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA) is so restrictive that some school districts can’t even find appropriate land for building new schools. In a way, the law is fulfilling its goal: to be greatly restrictive of growth. But as the state grows, new schools have to go somewhere.

Even many starry-eyed GMA fans recognize that killing off new schools takes things too far – and that voters are likely to disapprove. Legislators hammered out a bipartisan compromise bill, HB 1017, that would allow some schools to be built outside Urban Growth boundaries.

How bipartisan? It passed 81-15 in the House and 31-17 in the Senate. Many Democrats voted yes, with only the ones most beholden to radical environmental groups voting no.

What happened?

When you read “radical environmental groups,” Gov. Jay Inslee likely sprang to mind. Inslee is famous for his global warming scaremongering, and for being chummy with the extreme end of environmental groups.

Given all that, the overwhelmingly bipartisan votes on the school siting bill meant nothing to Inslee. He vetoed much of the bill, crafting his veto so that the bill only applies to Pierce County. The Bethel School District there has been unable to build a new high school on 80 acres it owns outside an Urban Growth boundary and has limited options.

Inslee alleviated Bethel’s problem, but what about every other part of the state? Too bad so sad. Inslee’s environmental allies said no to GMA exceptions, not even for schools.

Inslee told reporters the possibility of the utilities being extended to new schools also being extended to housing developments justified his veto: “You just have to make sure the pipe is just big enough to serve the school and not some additional development that would otherwise contravene the value system that is in the Growth Management Act.”

The fallout

Legislators, especially from rural areas, saw Inslee’s veto as further proof that the governor doesn’t make decisions with the entire state in mind. Rep. Bob McCaslin (R-Spokane Valley), the bill’s prime sponsor, said, “It’s a shame the governor, despite his continued talk of one Washington, is not serious about treating rural communities the same as urban communities.”

“I’m disappointed,” Sen. Hans Zeiger (R-Puyallup) told the News Tribune. “There are a lot of school districts out there that could use some new options.”

Though he called it “a huge step forward” for his district, even the superintendent of the school district Inslee singled out, Bethel, said other districts need help too. From the News Tribune:

“Still, Seigel said he would have liked to see Inslee sign off on the entire bill, which he said would have helped other districts struggling with the same issues. The Washington State School Directors’ Association estimates that 28 of the state’s 295 school districts face situations similar to Bethel’s due to the constraints of the Growth Management Act.”

Legislators say responding to Inslee’s partial veto with a new bill is unlikely this year. That will give them, and voters, plenty of time to contemplate yet another instance of Jay Inslee choosing his environmental allies over local communities.

No one was shocked when time ran out on the 105-day legislative session with no budget deal in sight. Lawmakers are now in overtime, but House Democrats and Senate Republicans are not yet negotiating.

Senate Republicans scored a major symbolic victory on Friday, with time expiring on the regular session, to prove that House Democrats’ major tax increase proposals have no chance of passing – even Democratic senators voted no.

What happened?

Friday’s move by Senate Republicans made conservatives chuckle but incensed Democrats. Tired of House Democrats passing big spending bills without bothering to find the money to pay for them, Senate R’s called their bluff.

It surprised people to see Republicans, who have a 25-24 majority in the Senate (with the help of dissident Democratic Sen. Tim Sheldon), bringing up tax bills they oppose for a vote. But it all had a purpose.

The tax bills they introduced are identical, word-for-word, to House Democrats’ own capital gains income tax and B&O tax hike proposals. The point was to show that the House’s big tax bills don’t even have the support of their fellow legislative Democrats. The gambit worked: Both bills lost on 48-0 votes.

The fallout

Sen. Dino Rossi (R-Sammamish) told 770 KTTH he hopes the tax votes will help the two sides start negotiating over realistic proposals sooner. “If we bring this to the floor and demonstrate to the world that those votes aren’t there, then maybe we can get that nonsense [massive tax increases] off the table and really get down to some negotiations,” he said.

Democrats dismissed the tax votes as “a stunt.” Sen. Kevin Ranker (D-Orcas Island) told Austin Jenkins, “The idea that we would just vote on some random tax package for the sake of taxes is ludicrous.” But it wasn’t “some random tax package,” it was House Democrats’ own tax bills. The 48-0 votes made a point, even if Democrats hoped it merely showed they wouldn’t participate.

Rossi didn’t see it as a stunt at all. “It’s just being straight forward and honest about it. Can we do this or not? Is it politically possible or not?” he said. “Well, the answer, we know, is not, but we have to prove it to the world.”

Will Democrats accept the obvious: That their own tax hike proposals have no chance of passing the Legislature? The sooner they admit the truth, the sooner lawmakers can start negotiating over proposals that could actually pass – and get out of town.