OLYMPIA — Asked for a photograph in front of burgundy velvet curtains in his office in the Capitol last week, Gov. Jay Inslee joked that he’d look like somebody at his own wake.
Then he began to feel he was being posed for his official portrait. On the brink of his final year in office, he doesn’t know when it will be painted, but that doesn’t stop people from asking.
“People are ready. They think that this is done tomorrow,” Inslee said. “I mean, but I’ve got a whole year left.”
Among the nation’s sitting governors, Inslee has been in the chair the longest. He’s not running for a fourth term, so the upcoming session is his last big chance to influence the direction of state policy. But he says he feels just as energized going into his 12th legislative session as his first.
Governors tend to focus on their legacy and what they’ll leave behind when they leave office in their last year, says Kristoffer Shields, director of the Center on the American Governor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. But their power can wane as the election nears.
“The last year is tricky,” Shields said. “It’s hard to get a lot done because the Legislature knows that if they wait long enough, there’s going to be a different governor in charge in a certain number of months.”
Inslee says he wants to use the session, which starts Jan. 8, to work on some of the biggest problems plaguing the state: homelessness, the yawning gap in mental health services and the fentanyl crisis.
Although he generally has support from a Legislature controlled by Democrats, that doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing ahead. The issues he’s prioritized are significant, seemingly intractable. The costs of state transportation projects are ballooning. And an effort to repeal the state’s new carbon market — a cornerstone policy of Inslee’s tenure — could be on ballots next fall.
In keeping with his “jock-in-chief” energy, he claims to spend little time on postgame analysis. He quips he’ll be forgotten a mere four hours after his departure from the governor’s mansion.
“We’re in the fourth quarter,” Inslee said. “And when you’re in the fourth quarter and you want to get to the goal line, you don’t think about the postgame news conference. You want to advance the ball.”
Pushes on mental health, homelessness, fentanyl
Asked about his top priorities for his final session, Inslee pointed to mental health, homelessness and the entwined problems of public safety and fentanyl.
In July, a federal judge fined Washington $100 million for providing inadequate mental health services to people in jails with severe mental health issues.
About 14,000 people are homeless and unsheltered in Washington, and many more are rent-burdened. More than 1,000 people have died from opioid overdoses in King County alone in 2023.
Inslee’s budget proposal says demand for behavioral health services is much higher than what the system can handle, and he is proposing $464 million more.
While it’s too early to say whether the governor’s proposal is in the ballpark of what lawmakers will ultimately choose to spend on behavioral health, it’s not out of scale, said Sen. June Robinson, D-Everett, chair of the Senate’s budget committee.
A decent chunk of that, about $141 million, would go toward operating a new mental health facility in Tukwila that the state purchased this summer to expand treatment capacity.
Robinson said the governor’s proposal on mental health puts more money both into institutional and community settings.
“I’m glad that his budget does have some investment in what I think of as both ends of the spectrum,” she said.
Fentanyl drives more than 90% of opioid-related deaths, according to the governor’s budget. Inslee wants more state money to go toward education on fentanyl, including programs for kids and prevention services in communities.
He also wants to expand low-barrier clinics that provide health services to people using drugs and money to expand programs certified to provide methadone and other medications to treat opioid use disorder in tribal and rural areas. Twenty-five out of 39 Washington counties don’t have an opioid treatment program.
Lawmakers and Inslee made a big push last year to invest in housing, altogether pouring in about $1 billion into housing spending. Washington needs about a million more housing units in the next 20 years to keep pace with demand.
The state has been working with local governments to remove people living in areas near state roads, bridges and rights of way and place them in stable housing. Inslee wants another $100 million for that housing. So far, about 1,000 people have been placed into housing from encampments.
When a reporter challenged Inslee in mid-December on whether the removals are cost effective, Inslee was testy.
“It’s worth saving lives,” he said. He said that by buying places for people to live, that means the state has “permanent assets” that can provide housing for decades, and it’s cheaper than the cost of putting people in jails or hospitals.
Democrats are poised to float policies to stabilize rents in the upcoming session. Inslee said he’s open to ideas but says the problem can’t be solved without more housing.
“That is the fundamental challenge of our state,” he said.
Asked whether he thinks he should have acted earlier on the issue of housing supply, Inslee said that if he’d proposed a billion-dollar housing program in 2012, “the Legislature wouldn’t have given us probably a dime.”
“Until you see the problem frequently, legislative bodies, and the public at large, aren’t willing to make an investment to solve it,” he said.
On public safety, the governor is proposing that the budget restore funding to pay for 80 state troopers and 100 non-field positions at the Washington State Patrol, which is filling vacancies after struggling to recruit a new generation of state police. He also wants more money for local task forces investigating drug distribution, rapid DNA testing, training for fire departments and to fund a pilot program to put speed cameras on state highways to see if they’re effective. According to his budget, one-third of traffic fatalities involve speeding.
Continuing the climate fight
Inslee is also going to spend part of his final year defending the Climate Commitment Act, which created a cap-and-trade system to limit pollution and put a price on carbon emissions.
Thousands of Washingtonians appear to support taking another look at the carbon market. Late last month, petitioners turned in signatures for an initiative to repeal the law, which opponents are blaming for driving up gas prices. Inslee is blaming the oil companies and says prices were highest before the market went into effect.
Washington has some of the country’s highest gas prices. While the average price for a gallon of regular gas has come down since the system went into effect, this year they far outpaced Oregon’s for the first time since at least 2015.
“Fundamentally, we have to make it so that polluters are paying for this, not citizens,” Inslee said. “And that means reducing pollution, requiring them to kick into the pot and give that money back to people to get cleaner energy sources.”
As governor, he thinks he has a role to play in showing Washingtonians the policy’s benefits. He believes there is “broad support for environmental laws in this state.”
In recent weeks, he’s been keen to point out that thanks to state policies, youth under 18 get to ride on transit and ferries for free, some students are getting to school on electric buses and Washingtonians have been able to get heat pumps and solar panels.
On top of protecting the legislation that created the carbon market, he wants to go on offense, passing legislation to allow Puget Sound Energy to stop using methane and adding a requirement in state law that oil companies fess up to their profits.
“We’re getting whipsawed by the oil and gas companies,” he said.
A ‘reluctant cheerleader?’
Although the governor proposes a budget, the Legislature ultimately decides how state money gets spent.
That means Inslee’s ideas get turned down sometimes — last year, lawmakers declined to get on board with his idea to borrow $4 billion to fund an aggressive push to build housing.
It’s not yet clear whether lawmakers will take him up on his proposals in the upcoming short session.
But House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, says that as far as big picture priorities like housing and homelessness, fentanyl and climate change, her caucus and the governor are aligned.
Inslee’s budget proposal would increase state spending by $2.5 billion, prompting cries of overspending by lawmakers across the aisle.
Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima, budget lead for the Republicans in the state House, has criticized Inslee for omitting “any serious tax relief” in his proposed budget.
“Budgets are about funding policies that improve the lives of Washington families, not spending every dollar on more bureaucracy just because you can,” Corry said.
Inslee has proposed a $200 credit to low- and moderate-income Washingtonians to compensate for home energy costs. About 400,000 Washington families are eligible for up to $1,200 through the Working Families Tax Credit, which had been in state law for years but was funded for the first time by lawmakers in 2021. But as of April, only a little more than one-third of those eligible were receiving the credit — Inslee has urged more families to apply.
Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, the Senate minority leader, says there are governors who are good at, and enjoy, the legislative process: the negotiating, the relationship building.
“That is not Governor Inslee,” Braun said. “He likes to toss it over the fence and hope it comes out his way and is pretty free with the veto pen if it doesn’t come out his way.”
One such example: the last day of the 2023 session, when Inslee released a video on social media urging lawmakers to pass a bill on drug possession that later imploded, which some viewed as a tepid last-minute effort before the bill failed on the House floor. Lawmakers left town without a deal, and Inslee called them back for a special session the next month. Braun says he can be “a reluctant cheerleader.”
Inslee is often compared to his predecessor, Christine Gregoire, who some say was more involved in the nitty-gritty of negotiations on tough topics.
Jinkins, who has been speaker since 2020, but was in the Legislature during Gregoire’s term, says the two just have different styles.
“He does the same thing; he gets people in the room,” Jinkins said. But, she said, he “leaves people space for thinking about it” and returns to the issue later.
“Which are both equally valid ways to try and negotiate difficult issues,” she said.
Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, recalls “rocky moments” in Inslee’s relationship with the Legislature early on. Republicans, and at times a Republican-led coalition, controlled the state Senate until late 2017, leading to gridlock on the state budget.
“I think over time, he learned and grew and those relationships improved,” Pedersen said.
Inslee says he’s pilloried either way.
“Every time I get involved in the intimate details, the Republicans will criticize that I’m too involved in the details,” Inslee said. “And every time that I allow the Legislature to do their work, they’ll say that I’m on the sidelines.”
