COMMITTEES

These past two years, I've served on three of the Senate's fourteen standing committees.

I am the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which writes legislation dealing with the state courts and judges, civil and criminal law, and any changes to our state constitution. Two of my major bills in the 2002 session came through this committee: SB 6361, substituting drug treatment for prison time as a response to street-level drug crimes; and SB 6704, responding adequately to legitimate threats of terrorist acts, without expanding wiretapping and without threatening the civil liberties of Americans.

On the Senate Ways and Means Committee, we examine our state's spending, and draft the Budget. This has been the scene of controversial responses to the spectacularly asinine tax-cutting Initiatives. We progressives will be under pressure again this year to go along with the politically spineless call to just cut spending and shut up. We'll be told that if we have a majority at all, it is only because we didn't raise taxes the last few years, so let's keep it that way. Personally, I'm in politics not just to be in politics, but to DO SOMETHING. We have to increase state revenues if we are to pay teachers a decent wage, fund our state colleges and universities so they can leave tuition relatively affordable, allow a living wage for the people who care for our elders and our children, and enforce the laws that protect our environment. If this means raising taxes, so be it. I favor an income tax on incomes over $100,000 per individual, so the burden of taxation falls more on those who can afford to bear it, rather than on the low-income workers as it does now.

I am also a member of the Senate Committee on State and Local Government, which deals with Growth Management--the control of suburban sprawl--as well as with the relationships between state agencies, and the powers of cities and counties. Back in 1990-91, I helped co-found the King County Chapter of Washington Conservation Voters because I feel strongly that sprawl is as much of a threat to our environment as logging and mining. If we are to avoid becoming another Los Angeles, we must quit our dependence on the single-occupancy car, quit building new highways, quit turning open meadows into strip malls, and start designing our cities consciously. And if you think we're far from becoming another LA, take a good look at Lynnwood. There's no there there. Instead, I favor transit-oriented development in densely-populated areas, and strict laws authorizing counties to discourage large-scale residential development in rural areas.