SEATTLE — There’s one thing Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Dave Reichert, the former congressman and King County sheriff, agree on.
Both candidates for governor have said the state ferry system is in dire straits and a prime example of governmental failure.
At a recent debate, Reichert, a Republican who has tried to broaden his appeal by distancing himself from certain positions of his party, said, “One of the first things that I would do is prioritize the ferry system. It’s totally inoperable.”
Ferguson, a Democrat who would inherit the troubled ferry system from his party ally and current Gov. Jay Inslee, said in an interview, “All around the state, I’m talking about ferries. The state is failing the residents on this really critical issue. … What impacts one Washingtonian impacts us all.”
As other issues define the race — drug use, public safety, abortion and the economy, among them — the ferry system has quietly percolated to the top of the candidates’ agendas as they argue about who can best fix a state agency without enough boats or people to staff them that’s also in the midst of a yearslong and expensive push to fully electrify its fleet.
Ballots will be sent to voters in mid-October and must be postmarked or placed in election drop boxes by Nov. 5.
Washington State Ferries has an aging fleet of 21 ferries with $240 million in deferred maintenance. The agency is in the initial stages of a nearly $4 billion project to completely electrify its fleet by 2040, but years of reduced service and canceled sailings have wounded its ridership and reputation.
Ferguson said he was the first candidate in a crowded primary to release a detailed plan to right WSF. On his website, nine bullet points describe his solutions, which range from elevating the head of ferries to a cabinet-level position to increasing the use of passenger-only boats.
He points to Reichert’s opposition to the Climate Commitment Act, which has promised at least $64 million to the ferry system through money generated by the state’s carbon market, though that money can’t be spent until Jan. 1. Alongside their choice for governor, voters will consider Initiative 2117 repealing the act.
“No. 1, he wants to cut funding for ferries. He’s opposed to the Climate Commitment Act. You can’t really get a bigger difference between us,” Ferguson said. “He has zero plan how he’s going to make up the funding.”
Reichert declined to be interviewed for this article despite being given two weeks to schedule a phone call. He responded to emailed questions, asserting he was the best candidate to fix the ferry system. His campaign website does not include a ferry plan.
For months, he has criticized Inslee and the Legislature for their plan to electrify the ferry fleet, while calling for the state to buy diesel-powered boats to bring the system back to its previous levels of service.
He’s now placing the blame on Ferguson, whom Reichert accused of “pilfering others’ ideas and claiming them as his own” after Ferguson said he would support more diesel ferries if it helped restore service sooner.
Ferguson’s urgency
Ferguson released his ferry plan in April.
Besides a cabinet-level ferry chief and passenger ferries, Ferguson reiterated many of the state’s existing programs and strategies to improve service, including meeting with island communities, seeking more federal funding, maintaining programs to recruit and retain WSF ferry crew members and maintaining the current fleet so the vessels last as long as possible.
But his proposal to “immediately” solicit bids to build two boats “to be delivered as soon as possible, including diesel ferries if this is the fastest solution,” as explained on his campaign website, led to accusations that he was embracing a Republican idea and weakening his party’s push to make the ferries more climate-friendly.
In this year’s legislative session, Republicans and some Democrats in Olympia had pushed for diesel boats to be built alongside hybrid-electric vessels but were rebuffed by Inslee and the majority of lawmakers.
Ferguson’s call for diesel boats not only came after the session ended but made him the last of the major gubernatorial candidates to do so.
Days later, at an Earth Day news conference extolling solar energy at Seattle’s Yesler Terrace and with all his would-be successors distancing themselves from his ferry plan, Inslee criticized anyone calling for new diesel boats as “brain dead.”
“I want to make this really clear,” Inslee said. “If we abandon this effort to electrify our ferry fleet and want to go back to build diesel boats, it will delay … our ability to get boats on the water by at least a year because we’d have to start the whole process over again. It would be a brain-dead thing to delay us getting more ferryboats at the same time we stop using a new technology that is ready for prime time.”
Ferguson described his ferry plan as less to do with Inslee, or his political party, and more to do with the urgency of the issue.
“There’s a crisis. If there’s a crisis, you have to act like there’s a crisis,” Ferguson said of the ferry system. “I’ve never been satisfied with the status quo. … For me, that’s always been my focus. I don’t like bureaucracy that gets in the way of solutions.”
The state could move much faster on ferries than it is now, Ferguson said, and called for a parallel effort to the current one seeking a builder of hybrid-electric ferries, but for diesel boats.
“If we can get ferries on the water more quickly that are diesel, then we’ll do it. That’s made some of my friends unhappy,” he said of his fellow Democrats.
While Reichert criticized Ferguson for taking his idea, Ferguson said, “I don’t think Washingtonians care where the ideas come from. I’ll take any good idea; I’ll take the best ideas and move forward.”
He said he was not suggesting that Inslee’s push for electrification was a bad idea.
“What I’m saying is, let’s be practical about this,” he said. “I’m not suggesting we need to overhaul the whole system. But the fact is, we do not have enough boats on the water.”
In an interview earlier this year with The Seattle Times editorial board, Ferguson compared the situation to the 2013 Interstate 5 Skagit River bridge collapse. At that time, Inslee declared a state of emergency, and the bridge was hurriedly repaired and reopened in less than a month.
“That same mentality is what needs to happen,” Ferguson said. “Because just like folks using I-5 need that as a lifeline for all sorts of reasons, well, guess what? Ferries are that same lifeline for a lot of Washingtonians, and it needs that same sense of urgency.”
Reichert’s diesel push
While pointing to ferries as one of his top priorities, getting the boats back to diesel aligns with Reichert’s general belief that the state’s climate policies are too expensive and not working.
That’s why he supports repealing the Climate Commitment Act, which he said has increased the costs of everyday necessities for “hardworking Washingtonians.”
He criticizes transportation funding that takes the focus off much-needed roadwork, saying at a debate that “we have totally ignored our road system here in Washington state.”
Ferguson has accused Reichert of downplaying the role people have in climate change. His campaign widely shared a recording of Reichert speaking in March at a “meet and greet” in the small Palouse town of Tekoa, near Idaho.
In it, Reichert said he wanted Washington to be “green, clean and pristine,” called environmentalism “a religion” and suggested humans had no role in climate, instead ascribing it to a higher power.
“I believe that the weather is changing, the climate is changing, but it’s the guy upstairs doing it,” he said. “We can do what we can do to make it clean. We want clean water and clean air, but we’re not going to be changing the weather with the stuff that we’re doing.”
In an email, Reichert said he does think “human activity” affects the climate but that the state should “take practical, effective steps to reduce emissions, transition to cleaner energy sources, and improve our infrastructure without pushing policies that burden families and businesses.”
Climate aside, Reichert has focused on ferries as emblematic of an ineffective government with misplaced priorities.
Like Ferguson, Reichert said the state should “get passenger-only ferries on board and operating as quickly as possible.” He also said the state should fund “private boat operators” to help move people “between the islands.”
But his focus has been on diesel-powered ferries. His solution, he said, is simple.
In an email, Reichert reiterated what he’s said numerous times through the campaign, that he would “fast track contracts for up to five new clean-diesel powered ferries that can be converted to hybrid-electric.”
However, his plan is close to what’s already happening. The state is in the midst of a call for shipbuilders to design boats capable of being powered by what it calls “hybrid-electric power.” According to the state’s plan, each boat will be capable of running on diesel and carry nearly 55,000 gallons of it at all times. The state’s larger ferries, the Jumbo Mark II class, use up to 350 gallons of diesel per hour each.
Asked to clarify how his plan differed from the current one, Reichert instead reiterated the need for ferries that can run on diesel and electricity.
With the first new boat expected under the state’s current plan in 2028, at the earliest, Reichert and Ferguson can be assured that the issue of ferries won’t go away this campaign season — and may well be an issue in one of their reelection bids as well.
