The state has admitted that a Democrat member of the Washington State Redistricting Committee purposefully delated texts of her communications which were sought in a public record request.  The state acknowledges in papers submitted in a lawsuit filed against the commission members that Commissioner April Sims, who was appointed to the commission by the House Democrat Caucus, deleted texts with her Redistricting Commission Chief of Staff Osta Davis and with Senate House Caucus Chief of Staff Dominique Myers.  The lawsuit was filed by open government gadfly  Arthur West, who is seeking records to determine why the commission failed to meet its legal deadline for approving new legislative and congressional district maps back in November 2021.

The illegal erasing of texts by someone as politically savvy as Ms. Sims – who is the incoming President of the Washington State Labor Council — is just one of many questionable activities by the two Democrat commission members during and after the redistricting process.  The Democrat members, especially Senate Democrat Caucus appointee Brady Walkinshaw, first attempted to derail the process by delaying final votes on the commission’s maps so that the nine liberal members of the Washington State Supreme Court would decide the district boundaries and thus void all the public input that went into the commission’s work. (The Olympian and Seattle Times)

The Seattle Times finally recognized that higher energy prices hurt lower income households the hardest, yet they refuse to point out that it is liberal policies which are causing the higher prices.  The leader of a local agency which helps lower income households stated, “Students all the way up to seniors are having to go without food or decide, ‘I’m going to be colder today’ … just to make ends meet.”  The article attributes the higher energy costs to “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, state goals for clean energy and the highest levels of inflation in 40 years,” yet never assigns the cause of these factors to the Democrats for their restrictive energy and inflationary policies.  And we don’t recall the Times ever discussing the impact these policies would have on the poor (as many Republicans did) when the economy-wrecking policies were passed by the Democrats. The newspaper barely mentioned that last year Republican legislators tried to use the state’s large budget surplus to provide gas tax relief to help lower income workers and that Democrats refused to even hold a hearing to discuss the proposal. Because that might have reduced the amount of taxpayer money the Democrats could give to their special interest donors such as state employee unions and wealthy environmentalists. (Seattle Times and Shift Newsmaker Interview)

The reaction by a Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell staff member to a recent bail decision by a King County District Court judge illustrates how the mayor’s office often talks tough privately about the city’s drug, crime, and homeless policies, but refuses to take a strong public stand for fear of antagonizing liberal activists. The King County Prosecutor Office emailed three members of Mayor Harrell’s inner circle to inform them of a judge’s decision to give a low bail figure to a man who was arrested for dealing drugs and possessing large amount of drugs and weapons in his RV parked by the West Seattle Bridge.  Prosecutors asked for $100,000 bail set for the suspect, who had a large supply of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and crack as well as knives and guns.  District Court Judge Kristin Shotwell ignored the prosecutor’s request and instead set bail at just $10,000 (which the defendant quickly posted to go free).

The mayor’s Director of Strategic Initiatives Tim Burgess (a former Seattle City Councilmember and star of Senator Patty Murray’s campaign commercials) responded to the prosecutor’s email by asking which judge set the low bail figure and then stated, “And people wonder why we have a fentanyl festival happening across the city.”  While it is good to see members of the mayor’s office appear outraged privately by the actions of soft-on-crime judges and liberal activists who enable the city’s increasing homeless, drug, and crime problems, it would be better if they strongly criticized far-Left judges and activists publicly.  Yet like nearly all Seattle political figures, Mayor Harrell never wants to upset the city’s liberal activist class nor hold them accountable for the many problems they have created and enabled. (MyNorthwest)

King County has experienced a 100% increase in the number of retail theft charges being filed since last year, as liberal policies have emboldened criminals into believing they will never be punished for their crimes.  Retail stores which had never been targeted for robberies in the previous decade have now become repeat crime victims since the Washington State Legislature and the Seattle City Council caved into liberal rioters demands and passed anti-police measures in 2020 and 2021.  Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who was noticeably silent during the riots featuring his supporters and when his fellow liberal politicians were passing their soft-on-crime measures, is now using the dramatic increase in retail crimes to increase the number of government employees in his office. The Attorney General has asked  the legislature to fund 10 full-time employees on his recently announced Organized Retail Crime Task Force. (KING5 News)

Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward criticizes the efforts of the Inslee Administration on the one-year anniversary of the creation of the large “Camp Hope” encampment on Washington State Department of Transportation property.  After nearly a foot of snow fell on the more than 400 people still inside the state-sanctioned encampment (which one resident labeled the “Lord of the Flies on drugs” due to the number of brutal beatings and rapes that took place on state property), Mayor Woodward asserted, “People in Camp Hope don’t have to be out there in the cold and freezing temperatures.  There has been no sense of urgency whatsoever from the state on this.”

Mayor Woodward was specific in placing the blame on the Lisa Brown-led Department of Commerce for failing to live up to its responsibility to fund a plan local officials developed last summer to provide shelter to the encampment residents.  The mayor said, “We had a plan to provide housing units for the individuals in the encampment, and four months later that plan hasn’t been funded or executed. (Commerce has) only agreed to certain elements of the plan, which gets us very few units.”  We should note that this delay from the Department of Commerce has occurred even though Director Lisa Brown took the unusual step to move her office location back to Spokane while she is still technically in charge of a government agency which has nearly all of its employees 300 miles away in Olympia.  Director Brown, who lost to Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers by 10% points in 2018, is expected to run for Spokane mayor in 2023 now that she has had the state taxpayers finance the re-establishment of her residency in the area. (Spokesman Review and KXLY News)

Washington farming organizations told state legislators that new state overtime rules are not only hurting farmers, but it has forced many small farmers to reduce the hours of workers and has driven them to look into more mechanization.  Last Friday, farmers informed the members of the House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee that they have already begun reducing the hours (and thus the paychecks) of workers due to a new state law which reduces every year the number of hours a worker can work (mostly during harvest) before they must receive overtime pay. Currently the threshold is 55 hours a week, and this will be reduced to 48 hours next year, and 40 hours in 2024.  Even one union representative acknowledged that while his union had yet to experience a reduction in hours, he had heard that it was occurring in other crops.

Farmers have asked that the state to permanently set the overtime threshold at 50 hours for twelve weeks (during planting and harvesting) or for the state to provide tax relief (as has been done in Oregon and New York) to offset the expenses.  Yet, since the committee (and the legislature) is controlled by urban liberal Democrats with little or none farming experience, it is doubtful elected officials will want to reduce state tax revenues by even a small margin to assist the agriculture community. (Capitol Press)

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