Charges escalated against drug suspects for witness threatening
Andrew Christiansen
Reporter
Two of the individuals arrested in recent drug busts have had charges against them escalated after threatening witnesses in the case, according to Goldendale police.
Terrie Jean Raymond and David Spadt were charged with intimidating a witness, a class B felony with penalties that could range from three to five years in prison. “We take this extremely seriously,” said Rick Johnson, Goldendale Police Chief. “We don’t tolerate it [intimidation of witnesses] in any way.” Police expect more arrests in the case.
A drunken driving arrest on April 23 turned into a DUI plus resisting arrest when Johdon Smith, 28, fought with a police officer who attempted to arrest her, according to police. Smith was observed driving erratically from Columbus Avenue, down Darland Street and along Washington Avenue to Broadway, tailgating a couple of vehicles along the way. When the officer stopped Smith, he believed he could smell intoxicants. Smith blew a .108, according to the report, with .08 the legal limit.
In other police action, much of the recent tagging of buildings, abandoned houses, and cars may come to a halt with the arrest of a juvenile male charged with malicious mischief. The suspect has admitted to spray painting 14 locations, according to police. One of the incidents in World War II Park could cost the city at least $20,000 due to permanent damage to plastic on playground equipment, according to police. The suspect was arrested following a tip from a passerby who saw him with a paint can in a Main Street alley.
In a related arrest, four juvenile girls were literally “caught red-handed,” says Lieutenant Reggie Bartkowski, spraying water soluble hair dye in the rest room at World War II Park. The parents of the four were contacted and immediately had the girls back in the park cleaning up their mess.
City clean-up day coming up
It’s time for Goldendale’s annual city-wide spring cleaning. This Saturday, May 1, is the City of Goldendale Clean-Up Day, at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., during which residents can offload garbage, recycling, brush, and even junked cars, for free with the right arrangements.
Excess garbage is limited to no more than one regular-sized pickup load per property. The city’s Public Works department will pick up and haul off brush for seniors and disabled residents if you’ve made arrangements. (The city’s Clean-Up Day ads in The Sentinel advised readers that the deadline for arrangements was Monday.) And if you made your junk car arrangements with the city police department, you can look forward to having that oversized paperweight taken off your property, courtesy of Joe’s Towing.
Drop on over to the transfer station and you can rid yourself of pesky recyclables. This includes newspapers, cardboard, cans, bottles, and even appliances.
For more information, call Allied Waste at 773-5825.
Loose ends remain in state’s $794 million in sweeping tax increases
The central drama of the 2010 Legislature ended Friday when Gov. Christine Gregoire signed bills to enact the $794 million tax increase lawmakers approved this year.
It wasn’t the end of the 2010 Legislature. That came the week before, during the wee hours of April 12, when House and Senate wrapped up 90 days of lawmaking and called it a session. By last week, most legislators had returned to their home districts.
And if the session really ends when the last bill is signed, Friday’s ceremony wasn’t the finish, either. Gregoire still has to sign the budget, among other bills. The constitution gives her until May 6.
Yet Friday’s bill-signing certainly marked the end of the biggest and most contentious drama of the year, the one that kept lawmakers at the Capitol a full 30 days after their scheduled adjournment, and the one that caused most of the session’s yelling, fuss, and bother. There was even a bit of suspense in the final act.
Not that there was any doubt the governor would sign. Gregoire was as much an author of the tax deal as anyone in the Legislature.
But observers had to wonder—when the spotlights were turned on and the TV cameras were running, and the governor picked up her pen—would there be anyone standing behind her?
It turned out that there was a crowd. But of the 75 or so people who showed up for the ceremony, most of them were aligned with social-service organizations—and only one of them was a legislator.
And so the story ends—which makes this the right time to tie up the loose ends of the session.
The big question of the year, of course, was whether it was a good idea to raise taxes in the middle of a recession—but it was far from the only one.
And that question really wasn’t settled, either. Lawmakers will get to deal with it again next year, in an even bigger way.
Worse problems ahead
This year’s tax increase doesn’t solve the state’s fundamental budgeting problems; it just puts off the day of reckoning. The trouble really got started in 2003, when a booming economy began handing the Legislature massive increases in tax revenue, without requiring it to raise taxes. Lawmakers spent nearly every penny available to them, launching new programs and awarding pay and benefit increases for state employees that obligated the Legislature to maintain the increased spending in future years. Even before Wall Street crashed in late 2008, projected spending for 2009-11 was $3 billion more than the state expected to collect in taxes.
Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, has argued that lawmakers didn’t have much choice about much of that spending. It’s not just a matter of caseloads and pent-up demands from constituent groups, she says—if the state had kept the money in the bank, voters might have passed a tax-rollback initiative. But the state also has enormous unfunded liabilities in its pension system, the result of benefit increases over the years and a reluctance to fully fund obligations as they arise. During the boom years, the state didn’t use its one-time windfall to catch up, and so pension payments will have to triple to unprecedented levels, some $2 billion, within the next three years.
The recession delivered an enormous shock—the eventual shortfall, over the last two years, totaled a staggering $12 billion, more than a third of the state’s budget. Lawmakers last year and this year took a patchwork approach, scrambling for every source of money they could find—one-time federal money, raids on dedicated state accounts, cutbacks in projected spending, even cutbacks in actual spending. And this year, majority Democrats said they’d done everything they could, and they had no choice but to raise taxes.
Even so, state spending remains out of proportion with revenues. Lawmakers face another shortfall next year, anywhere from $2 billion to $3 billion, and next time the easiest cuts will have been made, and the federal government may not be able to bail out the state.
Efficiencies not considered
Minority Republicans, who didn’t have much say in the matter, point out that the Legislature didn’t do everything it could—it missed a chance this year to consider more fundamental reductions in ongoing state programs. The biggest symbols were its failure to consider selling off the state liquor stores and eliminating the state Department of Printing. Both were strongly opposed by the Democrats’ allies in public-employee unions. Democrats were loath to cross them after canceling their cost-of-living increases last year and ordering state-employee furloughs this year—unions already are threatening to withhold campaign contributions.
Although the budget made surgical cuts to state spending within programs and managed to reduce last year’s overall spending plan by about a half-billion dollars, new spending within this year’s budget totaled $400 million.
Democratic leaders say it’s hard to cut spending in the middle of a crisis. The only problem, they concede, is that it’s even harder to say no when the state has plenty of money. Meaning there’s never a good time to cut.
The session’s biggest irony
What kept lawmakers in town an extra 30 days after their regular session ended March 11 was a tussle between the Democrats in the Senate and the Democrats in the House. To raise money, the House hoped to play a popular political card—it would close tax loopholes. But it turned out those tax exemptions for business weren’t as big or as easy to close as the leadership would have liked. Every one of them had supporters; most could make a compelling argument.
The Senate Democrats went along with the easiest choices, but said the last few hundred million dollars ought to come from a general sales-tax increase that would be paid by every resident of the state.
That raised the hackles of liberal groups everywhere—the sales tax is regressive, meaning that it takes a bigger bite, percentage-wise, from people with lower incomes.
In the end, the Senate blinked. The inside line is that House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, won big at the expense of Brown’s Democrats in the Senate.
The final deal, brokered by the governor, offered an enormous irony. To avoid one regressive tax increase, Democrats picked one just as big. The final tax deal raises taxes on candy, gum, soda pop, cigarettes, bottled water, and cheap beer—the sorts of things those same low-income people buy whenever they visit the 7-Eleven.
So to avoid a tax on those who aren’t wealthy, the Legislature targeted Joe Sixpack instead—and Democrats had to struggle to explain the difference. That spending is optional, they said. Convenience store owners take a rather different view.
—Erik Smith, Washington State Wire
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