Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

State Weighs Future Needs

Gov. Gregoire To Visit Everett Monday To Get Citizens' Ideas

Original Article

EVERETT – When Gov. Chris Gregoire comes to the Everett Events Center on Monday, residents can bluntly tell her their priorities for the state and whether their taxes solve any real troubles.

These opinions, she says, will help mold her thinking this fall as she writes the multibillion-dollar budget to run the state during the next two years.

But many troubles take longer than two years to erase.

So those who show up might want to suggest ways of preparing for a day well beyond the next biennium.

“Washington state has problems that many other states envy. They are problems of prosperity,” said David Jackson, a policy analyst with the Brookings Institution and a former Seattle resident.

People are arriving in droves lured by the ability to find a job, buy a home and raise a family, spending weekends on the beach or climbing a volcano, he said.

“To avoid truly poisoning this atmosphere, people need to look at more than two years down the road; they need to look at 20 years,” he said. “They have to worry about destroying the very reason people move there.”

Challenges facing the state are well-diagnosed.

The state’s population is growing, residents are aging, roads are clogged, health care is scarcer, insurance is costlier, schools are short of dollars, colleges lack seats, new homes are cropping up everywhere and the environment needs protecting.

Experts debate which of these is most critical and what solution ought to come first. They said residents count on elected leaders to figure it out.

“We’re not as worried as we should be,” said University of Washington professor David Harrison, a senior lecturer in the Evans School of Public Affairs. “We live in such a beautiful place it does allow people a little more complacency than it should.”

Gregoire, as governor, can use the bully pulpit of the office to pursue ideas to prevent today’s manageable challenges from becoming tomorrow’s devastating crises.

Which to pursue is not always clear. When experts peer into the crystal ball, the first thing they see is a growing population and the need to figure out where they will all live and work.

“We still have not worked out the big issue of how we can function on this patch of earth,” Harrison said.

Designers of the 1990 Growth Management Act viewed it as the modus operandi for balancing economic development with environmental protection.

The law has proved itself an imperfect fulcrum for this political teeter-totter. Pressure for change is coming.

Don’t forsake the original vision of the act, said Leonard Bauer, managing director of the state’s growth management services.

“If everyone plans for their own boundaries they miss the big picture,” he said. “It seems to me more and more we have to get past our jurisdictional boundaries and look at things holistically.”

Urban policy analysts and elected officials, including King County Executive Ron Sims advocate for increased density of developments in cities to ease pressure for paving over rural lands. “Build up, not out,” is their motto.

The point is to make more effective use of urban regions, Sims said. Residents can live close to jobs and shopping and rely less on using cars to get to work. If they’re not walking, they can use a bus or light rail, he said.

That’s pivotal, Sims said, because global warming is the most serious matter facing the state and it is only exacerbated through sprawl that puts more resources in use over a greater space. Lawmakers need a policy forcing themselves to consider the effects of global warming.

Washington’s population is also getting older as highly educated and uniquely skilled 25- to 45-year-olds – key pistons in the economy – leave for better jobs or additional schooling.

“You cannot have your intellectuals move out of the system,” Sims said. The state needs a great university and a solid education program “so people will remain.”

There is little debate on the value of building a new four-year university in the area, though, without money, it won’t serve all those who want to go there.

Harrison said the state could benefit by directing universities and community colleges to better assist the habitually hard-to-employ 25- to 45-year-olds.

“Can we give (colleges) enough resources to serve that floundering 25-year-old because we need that floundering 25-year-old to keep our economy strong,” said Harrison, who is also chairman of the state Workforce Training and Education Coordination Board.

“It could give us an opportunity to reduce poverty in our community,” he said.

Education needs retooling, with an eye to having graduates step into jobs that are international in scope.

With Washington’s biggest industries dependent on foreign trade, the state should require students be taught a foreign language so they are able to perform better on the global stage, Sims said.

“You can’t compete with countries who measure literacy by the number of languages we speak,” he said.

Development undertaken to serve population growth is making worse traffic tie-ups in the Puget Sound region.

“If we don’t do something with the I-5 corridor, we are going to choke on traffic in 20 years,” said Bruce Agnew, director of the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center that seeks to unclog the region’s gridlock.

There is only so much capacity on roads, and no one’s talking about what will be done “when we hit it,” said Thomas Till, also a director at the center.

There are a dozen agencies responsible for transportation in the region. That’s “too many cooks in the kitchen,” said Agnew, an Everett native and former Snohomish County Councilman

A 2006 law set up a panel to look at this lineup. Gregoire should embrace trimming the number, they said.

At the same time, the state should look to change the behavior of drivers in hopes of getting them off the roads, or at least not on them all at once.

Till described one method using technology to track travel on designated routes such as I-5 and assess fees for the drivers based on when they are on the road. They’ll pay more for driving during the most-congested hours, less if it’s off hours.

The deteriorating condition of roads, sewer and water systems cannot be overlooked, said Nancy Rutledge Connery, a former state employee who is vice president of public affairs for Renaissance Integrated Solutions in Maine.

Connery, who has worked with and alongside elected leaders for years, knows a state such as Washington cannot permanently fix all of its problems at once.

“They’ll never have a point where there are not constraints and there are not politics,” she said. “The state must really be the encourager of ideas and to provide a place for risk takers to try out ways to make the future better.”

Reporter Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.