ELIMINATE THE CAUSE is sound logic if one wants to change the result, whether dealing with financial woes or personal or societal ills.
A girl I called Lori dug through her purse and searched under her couch cushions for coins to give her husband to buy milk for their babies.
He returned home with beer, not milk.
He didn’t have enough money for both, he explained.
That incident enabled my niece to recognize the addiction that had trapped her family in poverty and abuse.
Divorce is painful, but it was necessary in order for Lori and her children to achieve a better life, financially and socially.
Blindness to addictions is also a barrier to solving public sector problems.
Faced with a multi billion-dollar budget shortfall, Gov. Chris Gregoire rolled out a budget she “hates” — a word she also used to describe her 2010 budget proposal.
Consolidating state agencies and selling some buildings — presuming there are buyers — may prove beneficial in the long run.
Voters who said “NO!” to higher tax rates may be miffed when they don’t get a presidential primary or all the spending they demanded in passing other initiatives.
It’s the litany of cuts to education, health care and public safety that Gregoire feels may not be moral.
“Penny wise and pound foolish” is the adage Arlene Engel, one of the seven Olympic Medical Center commissioners, applies to Gregoire’s proposal to strip away an already thin safety net.
Eliminating the entire social services budget wouldn’t save enough to fill the hole, said 24th District state Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam.
What’s a governor to do when there is no money?
The prolonged financial crisis may not be Gregoire’s fault, but ending it will require recognizing addictions that contributed to it, and curbing them.
Compared with other states, Washington is addicted to public sector labor unions.
Trimming state employees’ compensation, benefits, pensions and numbers, as proposed by Gregoire, won’t break the unions, but it might appropriately moderate the effects of excessive deference to union political power.
Gregoire might also propose curbing the state’s addiction to regulatory planning.
Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, traces the housing bubble, which is widely blamed for triggering the national financial crisis, directly to “the amount of regulation imposed on landowners and developers, and in particular a regulatory system known as growth management.”
Jeff Monroe of Carlsborg, owner of Monroe House Moving, pointed me to O’Toole’s advice:
“States that use some form of growth management should repeal laws that mandate or allow such planning.” (www.cato.org, Report 646)
Politically, there is no chance of repealing Washington’s Growth Management Act — known as the GMA.
However, in light of the budget crisis, it should be possible to slow down, or even halt, spending on re-planning and re-regulating, ad infinitum.
Right now, Clallam County is spending a $1 million state grant on rewriting shoreline management rules.
It is not that Clallam County did not have rules or even a situation where the rules were suspected of causing environmental harm.
Rather, the grant came because state regulators wanted to develop a new model code. Clallam was ready, willing and eager.
Before the GMA was enacted in 1990, most of the state’s 39 counties, including Clallam and Jefferson, already had zoning codes.
The act required them to start over. The process has been repeatedly amended to assure that planning never ends.
Meanwhile, failed culverts continue to block fish passage and dump silt into streams throughout North Olympic Peninsula forestlands.
The culvert problem was identified at least 15 years ago.
Each year, we fix a few and others fail.
There’s never enough money to fix them all.
There is never money to prevent more failures.
The money always goes primarily to rewriting regulations, while process inflates the cost of each fix.
Curbing our addiction to writing regulations would free resources to carry out real work, to heal the economy and the environment, under regulations already written.
Will Gregoire and company recognize and curb their addiction?
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Martha M. Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999.
She is on the administrative staff of Serenity of House of Clallam County, co-owns a Carlsborg-area farm with her husband, Dale, and is active in the local Republican Party, among other community endeavors.
Her column appears every Friday. E-mail: irelands@olypen.com.
