Bill Bryant seeking governor’s office

Gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant

In late May, Seattle Port Commissioner Bill Bryant declared his candidacy for the 2016 governor’s election, officially beginning his bid to run against Democratic-incumbent Jay Inslee, who was elected in 2012.

The two-term Port Commissioner, who identifies mostly with the Republican party, was first elected to the position in 2007, where he took just more than 50 percent of the votes and unseated an incumbent commissioner. When he ran for re-election in 2011, he commanded more than 60 percent of the vote.

Bryant, accompanied by Ninth District Representative Joe Schmick, visited Colfax and other areas around the ninth district last week. While in Colfax, Bryant and Schmick stopped at the Gazette to talk about his run for governor.

Bryant said he spent the first two months of his campaign seeking donations. In about 10 weeks, he was able to raise more than $500,000.

Bryant said he believes that the people of Washington state have concerns, which he said he is ready to address.

“Overwhelmingly, people in Washington state are very concerned about the direction our state is moving in,” he said. “They’re concerned that their kids are not going to have the opportunities that they had.”

One issue he touched on is education.

“We have a situation where 25 percent of our ninth graders will not graduate from high school, and we accept that,” he said. “We have a situation, which I think is even worse than the graduation rate, in that over 50 percent of the high school graduates and people who tried to enroll in community college did not have the skills they needed to begin taking community college classes, even though they have a high school degree.”

Bryant called this “wrong” and said he sees it as a function of an outdated system.

“It’s morally abandoning these people, and it’s undermining our economy,” he said. “It’s not just a function of how much money we’re spending. We have a pre-World War II educational system that’s failing the kids in the 21st century.”

Bryant said one thing he sees wrong with the education system is levy funding that taps into the socioeconomic status of the area.

“Back when I was going to school, we funded education across the state, and basic education was fully funded,” he said. “Over the last 30 years, we’ve moved to the more levy-based funding. So we have a situation now where if you are in an affluent suburb that has high property tax values your kids are going to have access to programs. But if you’re in a community that doesn’t have high property tax values, you end up taxing yourself even more.”

He said the problem this creates is unequal education.

“We’ve created this environment where kids are going to get a different education based on their zip code, and that’s wrong,” he said.

Bryant said he is ready to fix education, and he said he would do it by reinventing the last two years of high school.

“We need to take the last two years of high school and make it much more relevant for what kids expect to do with their lives,” he said.

He said this could be accomplished in specialized programs, such as a skills centers where students declare a path based on their interests, such as nursing, and take courses geared toward that while still in high school.

“Kids, when they have these other programs that they’re real excited about, they start performing better in other classes because now they’re engaged again,” he said. “And then we keep them in school.”

He said the goal should be that every child not only graduates from high school, but is ready to graduate.

“Our goal should be to make sure that every kid graduates from high school with the knowledge and skills they need to be economically independent,” he said.

Bryant said the changes would not be radical, but would be necessary adaptations that would increase student performance and increase the graduation rate across the board.

Another way he sees to fix the educational system is by looking away from the calendar.

“You have to break with this idea that the education system we have, which we invented between the wars, is the one that we’re going to have forever,” he said. “We should look at the calendar. We have an agrarian calendar, which is not really meeting the needs of the people in the 21st century. We have this idea that kids move forward in what is really an industrial age system where you get on the conveyor belt and you move forward based on how old you are.”

Bryant said this system is not working anymore.

“What we should be doing is having kids move forward as they master the material,” he said. “It’s the carnegie system where you move forward based on your age even if you haven’t mastered the material.”

Bryant said that by having students move forward when they’ve mastered the material rather than when their age says they should, this also adds a different dimension of accountability for teachers.

“It’s easier to see which teachers are performing because you can evaluate which kids are moving forward or not,” he said. “It brings some more accountability into the school system, and it also ensures that kids are learning before they move on.”

What, in his own words, sets him apart from any other candidate who calls for educational reforms?

“None of them want to jeopardize their second term,” he said. “If you go in and do some of those simple and reasonable changes you’re going to be going after some very entrenched interests, and you have to be prepared to lose the second term.”

Bryant said this settles well with him.

“I would rather go in there and try to make some significant differences, and if I am successful and as a result of that lose the second term, then I’ll go back to work. I’ll go back to my company,” he said. “I would rather do that than hang out for another four years and had been there eight years and not made change.”

Stating that he is not “a career politician,” Bryant said there are things he wants to accomplish in office, and once those are accomplished, he would likely not seek re-election. He said he’s been a port commissioner for two terms now, and he’s accomplished what he set out to accomplish there, so even if he was not running for governor now he would not be seeking re-election there.

“I wanted to do four things at the Port of Seattle, and I’ve done them,” he said. “So even if I weren’t running for governor, I wouldn’t be running for re-election. I would go back to the company. I’m going to take the same position if I were fortunate enough to be elected in that there’s some things I’d like to get done and if I get to do them, and if I don’t win re-election because I fought, then I’ll go back to my company.”

Moving to other issues he sees for Washington, Bryant addressed the transportation package passed in the most recent legislative session, which will help to fix more than 100 deteriorating bridges and several highways across the state, including the addition of passing lanes on Highway 195 and 26. Bryant said the package is a great step, but he wants to see more done.

“I think we need some more serious reforms on how the Department of Transportation spends our money,” he said. “We need to deliver projects on time and on budget and have the best management practices on how these projects are being delivered, and we don’t have that right now.”

In addition to projects, he discussed the state’s gas tax, which is one of the highest in the nation at 62.9 cents per gallon, including the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. The tax will also increase another 4.9 cents per gallon next summer.

“We need to begin a discussion on what we are going to do to replace the gas tax because it’s not a sustainable way to fund our transportation system,” Bryant said.

Bryant also discussed running against an incumbent governor. The last time an incumbent governor was unseated in Washington state was when Booth Gardner ran a successful bid against John Spellman in 1984. Spellman, elected in 1980, was the last Republican governor in the state.

“We did a poll before I announced that showed only 36 percent of the people wanted to re-elect Inslee,” Bryant said. “Forty-three percent liked him, and 44 percent did not. You have people who like him but don’t want to re-elect him.”

Bryant said these numbers reflect the people seeing a “lack of leadership.”

“He’s introduced this really partisan attitude in Olympia that’s not who we are,” he said. “As a result we’re not getting stuff done. I think the people just really want to have government work and do what it’s supposed to do and then get out of our way.”

He also said he wishes to not see party lines.

“Overwhelmingly people are not identifying with either party,” he said. “They want people to come together and get stuff done.”

On the website for his campaign, he lists four ideas he has for Washington, including an education system that provides hope to every child in the state, a cleaner Puget Sound and a more beautiful Washington state, a balanced budget and fiscally responsible state government and good jobs for every community in Washington. On his website, it states that these ideas are not Republican or Democratic, but that “they’re drawn directly from Washington state’s rich tradition of pragmatism and bi-partisanship.”

Bryant said he plans to spend a lot of time in central and eastern Washington for his campaign. He is hoping to encourage registered voters to vote.

“We often say it doesn’t matter how we vote because King County is going to determine the election,” he said. “Yeah, King County is one third of the registered voters, but that means that two thirds of the registered voters are outside of King County. What is different is that the people in King County vote.”

For more information about Bryant and his campaign, visit his website.

http://www.billbryantfor governor.com