Inslee foe Bill Bryant stops by county

Gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant made a stop in Colfax last Thursday on his campaign trail.

Bryant, former two-term member of the Seattle Port commission, was on his way to a Republican rally at the WSU campus and stopped at the Gazette to discuss his campaign for governor against incumbent Jay Inslee. Bryant said his campaign is “going great.”

“The Elway Poll was released about two weeks ago, and he’s in trouble,” Bryant said. “Inslee is about 39 percent average, and I’m around 30 or 31.”

Bryant said though he is at a lower percentage than Inslee, there are still a lot of people who are undecided.

“Thirty-one percent are undecided. The undecided’s know Governor Inslee, and they’re undecided because they’re looking for an alternative but don’t know enough about me yet to say that they’re voting for Bill,” he said. “My position, that’s a great place to be 10 months before the election. Any governor who is under 50 percent 10 months before their re-election is in trouble.”

Among issues Bryant discussed while in Colfax were the new bathroom regulation allowing transgender people access to restrooms and locker rooms according to person’s gender identity, transportation, early prisoner release and his idea of what he would do in the governor’s seat.

The bathroom regulation went into effect Dec. 26 after the Washington State Human Rights Commission implemented it.

Bryant told the Gazette that he does not believe the Human Rights Commission should have the power to create that regulation without input.

“Everybody deserves to have a place where they feel safe, and that includes people who are transitioning between genders, but it also includes the junior high school girl who wants to go in the locker room and go to the bathroom,” he said. “The Human Rights Commission has overstepped its bounds by picking the rights of one over the rights of another group.”

Bryant said that if he were to be elected, he would, by executive order, set aside the regulation “until the legislature could address it in public.”

“This is an issue that the legislature should sort out in public hearings and come up with something that the people could support,” he said. “This is not something that a small group of governor’s appointees should decide.”

Transitioning to transportation, Bryant said that one of his top priorities in office would be getting the Department of Transportation to shift its priorities.

“I want to make the elimination of traffic jams and the increased movement of freight the top priority for the Department of Transportation, and you can do that on day one,” he said.

To accomplish this on day one, Bryant said, takes shifting priorities.

“You can totally change the priorities of the Department of Transportation so that funding for projects that are actually going to eliminate traffic jams or increase freight, and all of these maintenance problems would fall into these categories, could be done,” he said. “You just rearrange the priorities on what gets funded first.”

The maintenance problems Bryant cited included funding for passing lanes on Highways 195 and 26 where two WSU students were killed in separate car accidents over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Bryant also touched on recent funding Inslee secured for fish culverts from the transportation budget which Sen. Mark Schoesler said should have been prioritized for fixing unsafe roads and keeping students safe.

“I would argue that the money in the transportation budget – and I’m a big proponent of needing to put in culverts to restore salmon habitat – should be coming out of the general fund and environmental budget, not out of the transportation budget,” he said. “We should be spending those gas tax dollars on resurfacing roads, rebuilding bridges, building the lanes that we need to in order to eliminate traffic congestion, and then we should take money out of the general fund and ecology budget for fish culverts.”

Moving to early prisoner release, which is an issue that came to light in December and, according to Inslee, resulted in more than 3,000 prisoners being set free too soon, Bryant called this “a symptom of a much bigger problem with the Inslee administration.”

Bryant, citing what Inslee told the media in December in that his staff knew of the issue since 2012, said there are a number of problems with this issue.

“You see problems where prisoners are being released early and his staff has known about it for three years and has not done anything to fix it, and has had 16 opportunities to fix it and didn’t,” he said.

Bryant continued on to describe three things that might have occurred which indicate an administrative issue.

“Either they didn’t know, and then you have to ask, why don’t you have people asking the right questions at meetings, or they knew and they didn’t want to tell him either because they didn’t think he cared or they don’t like to bring him bad news,” Bryant explained. “That’s a culture where you don’t have an executive leading the organization.”

Bryant described that this issue, among others, leads him to believe the governor is not focused on all the issues.

“Cumulatively, it’s clear that he’s very focused on climate change, but the day-to-day running of the state is not priority for him,” he said. “At the end of the day, the people need a governor who can make sure that traffic moves and kids learn and prisons work. That may not be an interesting part of the job to him, but that’s the job.”

Bryant said he hopes to change that if he is elected in November.

“Day one, we’re going to launch a four-year, zero-base budget initiative. We will, over the course of the first four years, entirely zero base the state budget,” he said. “We will look at every state agency, every program and every tax incentive, and we will identify what the objectives of that agency are supposed to be, what its legal requirements are and we will determine whether the programs that are there are run in a way that helps meet those objectives. And if they’re not, then we either fix them or eliminate them.”

Bryant said an overhaul like this is something that has been a long time coming.

“That review is going to ensure that those agencies are being run as efficiently as possible and that they’re focused only on their primary objectives,” he said. “That kind of rebuilding the budget and reevaluating of agencies has not occurred in decades in Olympia, and it’s long overdue. That will ensure that taxpayers’ money is being spent well.”

Bryant also said that he knows that move might draw criticism and fire, but he wants to remain focused on what is important for the people and the operation of the state.

“You’ll get cheers and you’ll get hung in effigy all at the same time, but it needs to be done,” he said. “No one does it for that reason because every governor knows that if they do it, they’ll jeopardize their second term. Let the second term, if it happens, take care of itself and focus on getting some stuff done in the first four years.”