A tough, bipartisan win: Murray-Ryan Budget Deal

originally published in The Herald

“For too long, we’ve rewarded the screamers,” Sen. Patty Murray told The Herald. It’s the screamers who foster cynicism and diminish public life. For the past few years, they’ve defined the first branch of government.

A respite from the clatter and two years of budget semi-certainty (everything is relative in the age of gridlock) are in the public interest. The Murray-Ryan budget deal is cringe inducing for partisans on both sides, but it trumps inaction. Absent a deal, Congress would pinball from crisis to crisis; the center — such as it is — cannot hold.

The agreement zeroes out $63 billion in military and domestic spending cuts over two years. The partial rollback of sequestration means programs such as Head Start and critical medical research will be spared the ax (Good news for Snohomish County, which saw the shuttering of a North Everett Head Start program earlier this year.). Domestic and military spending would tick up from $967 billion for the current fiscal year to $1.012 trillion. The package trims the deficit by between $20 and $23 billion.

Who takes a hit? Federal workers will need to contribute more to their pensions, saving $6 billion, and military pensions will reflect a slower cost-of-living adjustment. Long-term unemployment benefits will expire at the end of the month, a Christmastime blow to 25,000 Washingtonians. Republicans wouldn’t budge on taxes; Democrats on entitlements.
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December 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Peace after the IAM vote: Back to the bargaining table

originally published in The Herald

The takeaway from the International Association of Machinists’ tsunami rejection of the pistol-to-your-head Boeing contract: Working people don’t want to get buffaloed, especially by elites.

The contract was textbook divide and conquer. Create an incentive package that segments union membership. A $10,000 bonus draws younger workers disinclined to stew about retirement. Ready-to-retire employees benefit now, however mindful of a raw deal for newer machinists. Solidarity, though, animates a union. An unintended consequence of finger wagging is shove-it unanimity.

As The Herald Editorial Board wrote on Sunday, “To ensure 777X production in Washington, Machinists have been pressured to take one for the team, ratifying a contract freighted with concessions. Trouble is, the Machinists are the team.”
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November 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Hope for the waterfront: Sale of the Kimberly-Clark site

originally published in The Herald

Everett’s future is anchored to a shoulder of industrial land that fronts Port Gardner. The old Kimberly-Clark mill is an invisible outline, spare and flat, devoid of life.

These 66 acres of central waterfront are a metaphor. Realists steeped in local history say that Everett will break your heart, that the city was built on shattered promises and backsliding investors. So what to make of a plan and a company seemingly harmonious with a working town? Pinch thyself?

On Wednesday, Everett learned of a new investor and a new promise. Not the grandiose 1890’s John D. Rockefeller who skedaddled, but the Northwest parent company of Foss Maritime, Saltchuk Enterprises (Chinook jargon for “saltwater.”) The promise is for 250 living-wage jobs, of an invigorated working waterfront.

Norse pessimism notwithstanding, there is cause for hope.

“We wanted job re-creation when Kimberly Clark closed,” Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson said. “This fits perfectly. ”

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October 3, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Eroding faith in politics: The government shutdown

originally published in The Herald

The madness of a government shutdown has a corrosive effect, not only on markets and morale, but also on young people who otherwise would gravitate to public life. That’s the intangible fallout, the post-traumatic slow burn. Paralysis in D.C. discourages the best and motivates the worst.

The blame game? Yes, hidebound Republicans in the U.S. House are responsible (or more specifically, a faction of hidebound Republicans). However, when families are turned away from Mount Rainier National Park today, when civilian military employees learn they won’t get paid, the blame is evenly spread. The impasse becomes a metaphor, the way not to get things done.

The visceral impulse is to throw the bums out, although that opportunity is a full 14 months away (note: officeholders and their families often take offense at the term “bums”). Most lawmakers work extremely hard. The challenge is ideological. Red states get redder, blue states get bluer, and never the polarizers shall meet.

Obamacare, with its overshadowed launch today, is the lightning rod. The law needs tweaking, but de-funding it again and again is theater, not leadership,
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October 1, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

For a people’s ombudsman: Snohomish County government

originally published in The Herald

A culture of accountability requires ethical leadership and an institutional check of the humans-are-no-angels variety. After his first 100 days in office, Snohomish County Executive John Lovick seems to have the leadership part down. Now comes the institutional check.

When Lovick unveils his county budget at the end of September, it will include $100,000 for a county ombudsman. It’s a promising first step to advance government accountability.

During the Aaron Reardon imbroglio early in 2013, The Herald Editorial Board recommended that Snohomish County disband its toothless ethics commission and establish a county ombudsman to quickly and effectively investigate citizen complaints. The idea has been championed by Deputy County Executive Mark Ericks, a former state legislator and U.S. marshal for Western Washington.
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September 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

Hitching to conservation: Negotiating landscapes

originally published in The Herald

Politics can be an ecosystem, a social science version of John Muir’s, “anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The Yakima River Basin Integrated Water Resource Management Plan is a $5 billion, 30-year mega-project that defines “integrated,” with multiple gears and political interests. Tug on one part, and we find it hitched to everything else.

The purchase of 50,000 acres in the Teanaway drainage from American Forest Holdings, LLC, earlier this month was a tangible step forward in protecting the Yakima River watershed. The land includes water rights that predate 1905, when the federal government received title to everything that hadn’t yet been privately claimed. As Gov. Jay Inslee notes, healthy management of the watershed will enhance water supply and quality as well as preserve sources of cold-water habitat for fish.

The Teanaway purchase is a standalone win for Washington. Curiously, the heart of the project — water storage for irrigation, fish and domestic-use — flows from failure. In 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation opted for a “no action” recommendation after concluding a four-year, $16 million research study on Yakima basin storage. The plan’s centerpiece was the Black Rock reservoir, priced at $7.7 billion. The project didn’t pass the cost-benefit test — coming in at 13 cents for every dollar invested — and supporters regrouped. For four years, the Yakima Working Group, under the rubric of the Washington Department of Ecology and USBR, has been fine-tuning the plan.

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August 15, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The fierce politics of water: Negotiating landscapes

originally published in The Herald

On Friday, the Washington Board of Natural Resources unanimously voted in favor of one of the largest private land acquisitions in Northwest history.

It’s an agreement that teases out a long narrative on water politics, interest-group horse-trading and the federal government’s role in the 21st century West.

In June, the Legislature approved $99 million from the capital budget to purchase 50,000 acres of the Teanaway River Valley north of Cle Elum. Forterra, a land conservation group, working in concert with the state, negotiated the agreement with the willing seller, American Forest Holdings, LLC.

The Teanaway sale will protect the river valley’s headwaters as well as the Yakima Basin watershed. In public lands parlance, it’s a “working landscape,” with recreational, livestock grazing and partially logged forestland.
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August 4, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , , ,

No more ‘Stop the presses!’: The End of an Era

originally published in The Herald

Late Saturday night. The unnatural ca-chug of presses unnaturally silent. From the last days of the Eisenhower Administration to the second term of Barack Obama, industrial walls amplified the mechanical thrum of ink on paper.

At the corner of California and Grand Avenues, the presses are still.

The Herald’s print edition lives on farther down Interstate 5, at Sound Publishing’s Paine Field facility. Something new, like a house uprooted, feels unreal. No middle-aged editor racing breathless from the newsroom, “Stop the press!” Today, it’s empty stools, a cavernous room reeking of blanket wash.

Places of work, the intersection of human and machine, create a kind of sacred space. Four walls and a shared experience of people coming together in common cause like a secular house of worship.

Ask a millwright from Kimberly Clark what they see as they look west across Port Gardner Bay. The imaginary outline of a brick monolith blasting with life; a razed building that ignites memories of shouting, triumph, boredom, exhaustion, hitting quota. Work. As poet Philip Levine wrote, “You know what work is — if you’re/old enough to read this you know what/work is, although you may not do it.”

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April 28, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Coal trains are poor policy: The coal-train reaction

originally published in The Herald

A long-view of coal-export facilities weaves together who is paying for what, the spectrum of environmental impacts, and forecasting where the country will be a generation from now.

But politics are rarely hitched to a long view of history.

For lawmakers, coal trains should be a crucible, a decision unadulterated by electoral or labor politics. Silence or “on the other hand” posturing doesn’t cut it.

Simply put, is this something Washington would like to be known for 20 years from now? A 21st century economy driven by aerospace, agriculture, and coal-export terminals?

No, but as George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

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April 21, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

A chance for a fresh start: Aaron Reardon’s resignation

originally published in The Herald

Thursday’s resignation of Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon was a joyless capsule on tainted leadership. Cathartic it wasn’t, because catharsis requires accountability, authenticity, a willingness to make amends.

A career politician adroit at taking credit for the labor of others, Reardon stood defiant, unwilling to shoulder blame or responsibility –or even feign humility — for a crisis of his own creation.

As the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, said to the White House congressional liaison in 1980, “You guys came in like a bunch of jerks, and I see you’re going out the same way.”

At his State of the County address, Reardon announced that he would resign at the end of May because of “false and scurrilous accusations” emanating from “groups that oppose” him. Exceptional investigative reporting by The Herald’s Scott North and Noah Haglund revealed evidence of online harassment and surveillance of Reardon’s political enemies — a list that extends to those who cooperated in the Washington State Patrol’s investigation of Reardon’s use of public money.

What, precisely, is false? Reardon merits an opportunity to defend his character and leadership but, like a third-world autocrat, he prefers to isolate, refusing to answer questions. It’s an evocative silence.
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February 22, 2013 phjackson Leave a response , , ,