Just because the Thurston County commissioners ultimately made the correct decision doesn’t made it correctly. That’s the message about two dozen property rights advocates delivered on Tuesday with respect to the county’s recently scrapped shooting ordinance. “While I agreed with the commissioners in this decision, process is policy,” said Glen Morgan, property rights director...
Read More »

Opponents of a plan to allow Sound Transit use of the center two lanes on the Interstate 90 Bridge in order to extend light rail from Seattle to Bellevue are planning to take their case back to the state’s highest court. Representatives from the Eastside Transportation Association, including former State Sen. Jim Horn and...
Read More »

  Washington State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-Spokane), following a spring that saw her party lose a bruising floor fight during which minority Republicans joined with a handful of Democratic defectors to defeat her preferred budget, has decided not to seek re-election this fall. Brown, 55, announced on Thursday that after 20 years...
Read More »

Masked anarchists clad in black outfits joined with hundreds of other protesters to smash dozens of store windows, spray-paint buildings and slash car tires in downtown Seattle on Tuesday in what organizers billed as a revolution against capitalism, economic unfairness and social injustice. More than a dozen people were arrested and numerous minor injuries...
Read More »

The Washington State Department of Ecology’s newly released climate change strategy, according to at least one outspoken critic, amounts to little more than a thinly veiled attempt to hinder development at a time when the state needs to be doing everything possible to promote private-sector business and jobs. “This is yet another obstacle in...
Read More »

  “We’re in nothing less than a battle for the future of our nation,” Shelton business owner Pat Tarzwell told a raucous crowd gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building in Olympia on Saturday. “And we have some serious catching up to do. Progressives have a 100-year headstart growing the size of government.”...
Read More »

In the final, frenzied moments of a special legislative session that extended seven hours past its deadline of midnight Tuesday, exhausted Washington state lawmakers who’d spent the past eight months trying to close a $1.6 million gap between projected expenditures and revenues, easily passed a capital budget that included $1.1 billion in new construction...
Read More »

Bleary-eyed Washington state lawmakers finally reached agreement on a long-delayed supplemental budget at 6:17 a.m. — more than six hours into a second special legislative session. “It doesn’t cut education, it’s balanced and it’s a quarter to 5,” Rep. Ross Hunter (D-Medina) said of the budget before it passed in that house by a...
Read More »

New Washington state government employees will still have the option of retiring early, but they’ll pay more for the privilege and benefit less under a compromise struck between Senate Democrats and a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats. The deal eliminates one of the major hurdles standing in the way of passing a supplemental...
Read More »

Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman’s lawsuit to prevent construction of a light rail line from Seattle to the Eastside via the Interstate 90 bridge was denied on Friday in Kittitas County Superior Court. Judge Michael Cooper’s summary judgment rejects — for now, at least — Freeman’s claim that work to extend light rail service to ...
Read More »