Inslee, on his way out, talks about successes, ‘disappointments’ and what he sees as his only failure

Jay Inslee is talking with his hands, as he often does, bristling slightly at a question of the biggest failure in his three terms as governor, as one might expect, and demurring blithely to suggest a question any politician would much rather answer.

“You didn’t ask me yet about my biggest successes,” he says, some 21 minutes into a 35-minute sit-down interview in his Capitol office. Which was not exactly true, as he’d already held forth handling two of the biggest challenges, the big Cs of COVID and climate change, on which he believes he acquitted himself well.

But he has a longer list prepared, bullet points on a page in the binder on the oak conference table that’s surrounded by high-backed leather chairs with the raised state seal on their heads. He begins to go through them as the embossed visage of George Washington looks over his shoulder.

It is the week before Christmas, just four weeks before he will vacate the office for governor-elect Bob Ferguson, and a day after Inslee released his final two-year budget plan that the state constitution requires of a sitting governor even when they will not be around to try pushing it through the Legislature.

It is a long list, in a sense befitting the fact that he is only the second governor in the state’s 136-year history to serve three terms, and includes enacting a capital gains tax, ending the death penalty, pushing paid family leave, more jobs in clean energy, a long-term health care system, better student aid, expanded mental health programs and more money for affordable housing and homelessness.

“I think it’s fair to talk about what I got done here, which I would argue is as productive a 12 years as any state’s had in the history of the nation,” he said.

Growing economy, growing problem

Jay Robert Inslee’s road to the governor’s mansion started in the 1980s when he got involved in a campaign for a bond issue for a new high school at the same time he was also working as city prosecutor for Selah. He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1988: won Central Washington’s 4th Congressional District in 1992, which he lost in a re-election campaign in 1994; came back to Washington, where he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1996; won a Western Washington Congressional seat in 1998 for the district that included his Bainbridge Island home. He kept that seat until resigning in early 2012 to run full time for what turned out to be a successful campaign for the state’s chief executive.

His first term included the gradual recovery from the recession at the end of the century’s first decade and a divided Legislature. Getting the state’s two-year budget through a Democratic House and a Republican-controlled Senate usually involved long nights, extra session and compromises. The first operating budget Inslee signed in 2013 – which, like the plan he released on Dec. 17, was originally drafted by his predecessor Chris Gregoire – was for $33.6 billion.

The latest spending plan Inslee released is more than double that at $79.4 billion. Some of that growth is from inflation. But much of it is from things Inslee points to as his successes.

Take the lack of affordable housing and growth in homelessness, which in many cases are two sides of the same coin.

In the 2013-15 budget, the state set aside $176 million for affordable housing and homelessness programs, data from Inslee’s office shows. The current budget is slated to spend $2.6 billion.

Yet homelessness remains a persistent problem, not just for the largest metropolitan areas but around the state.

That’s not unique to Washington, Inslee said, and in some respects is a symptom of the state’s economic success. A booming economy drew about 1 million more people to Washington in the last decade, but the state has only built enough for about 330,000 new people.

“I know that sounds like an irony, but I believe it,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight, and I wasn’t going to shut down the economy to solve the problem.”

Supply and demand, coupled with that economy, drove home prices and rent up and up. The fentanyl crisis and inadequate mental health services exacerbated the problem.

While he didn’t foresee that eventual size of the problem, Inslee contends it would have been hard to persuade the Legislature to spend billions to address it at the beginning of the last decade.

“If I would have proposed a $4 billion housing program in 2013, I would have been laughed at,” he said.

Facing COVID without a template

In the final year of Inslee’s second term, a few months after he had abandoned a brief campaign for president, Washington became the first state to report a case of COVID-19, and the first to have a known virus-related fatality. As the pandemic began to take hold, Inslee ordered schools and many businesses to close in a policy dubbed “Stay Home, Stay Safe.”

“We didn’t have a lot of template to follow,” he said, adding that with the uncertainty of the various measures available, he “doesn’t use the terms right or wrong in any judgmental sense.”

“We decided to not let it swallow us,” he said. State officials decided saving lives was “the principal value” even though that meant painful decisions for business owners and their employees.

“Everyone had valid concerns about the policies,” he said.

While he felt the weight of telling people who had their life savings tied up to business they had to shut down, he believes it was “a necessary decision to save lives.”

Those decisions often came in the form of emergency declarations that did not need legislative approval, and Inslee resisted calls by Republicans and even some Democrats to call the Legislature into emergency sessions to help deal with the pandemic.

“In retrospect, would it have been nice to get kids back into school earlier? Yes,” he said.

But his first attempts to reopen schools met with resistance from what he calls “the education community” – teachers, administrators, school boards – because of their safety concerns. “Finally I said, ‘We’re going back.’ Once we made the decision, people got on board. … Educators did a tremendous job in very difficult circumstances.”

Some students still struggle after so long away from the classroom, and he believes the state needs to continue spending resources on helping them catch up.

Some states allowed more businesses to stay open or allowed businesses or schools to reopen sooner. But Inslee believes Washington made the right decisions with the available information, and some statistics support that.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists the death toll from COVID-19 in Washington between 2020 and 2022 as 11,653. The state was consistently among those lowest rates of COVID deaths per 100,000 people during that time. Some states with less restrictive COVID measures had death rates three and four times the rate of Washington.

“If we’d have had the same death rate as Mississippi, we would have lost another 18,000 people,” he said.

Vindication at the ballot box?

After announcing his budget proposal, Inslee attended the state Electoral College meeting where many of the gathered electors – all ardent Democrats assembled to cast the state’s 12 votes for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – took turns lauding him and thanking him for his service. At about the same time, legislative Republicans were excoriating the budget plan for calling for an increase in spending when revenues are projected to shrink and proposing a “wealth tax” – a unique and untested way to make up some of that shortfall.

He also got blowback from some of his normal allies, like teachers, who noted the percentage of the state budget set aside for schools would shrink. Legislative Democrats, who will be writing budgets of their own in February, are complimentary but not overly enthusiastic.

State Rep. Timm Ormsby, the Spokane Democrat who has chaired the House Appropriations Committee for much of the governor’s tenure, thanked Inslee for providing the budget and signaled he doesn’t favor an “all-cuts” budget, but was silent on how to get some extra money. Instead, he was going to “look forward to reviewing (the budget) more in the coming weeks.”

Inslee worked for years to convince the Legislature to approve a limited capital gains tax, which kicks in when an individual has investment gains of more than $150,000 in one year. It was seen by him and many progressives as a way to mitigate a state tax system regarded as favoring the rich because it relies on sales taxes and property taxes. But opponents argued the capital gains tax was really an unconstitutional income tax in disguise.

When the state Supreme Court ruled the capital gains tax was constitutionally distinct from an income tax, opponents tried to repeal it with an initiative on the November ballot. By a margin of nearly 2-to-1, voters decided to keep the tax in place.

“The overwhelming support might have been – I’m not going to say surprising – pleasing,” Inslee said. “I felt there was a large sentiment in our state for fairness.”

He believes that sentiment also prompted voters to reject plans to scale back the state’s long-term care insurance program and scrap the state’s carbon pollution reduction plan, both of which he championed.

“I felt very vindicated in my leadership over the last 12 years,” he said, saying tax fairness, better health care and fighting climate change were just below COVID in his top accomplishments. The rejection of those ballot measures, allow him to “go out on top” even though he wasn’t on the ballot, he added.

The state’s partisan divide generally runs along the Cascade Crest – Democrats to the west, Republicans to the east – and if anything, the blue areas have become bluer and the red areas redder in the last 12 years. But the results of those ballot measures suggest the state may be less divided on issues, Inslee said.

The increasing identity by party labels seems to be fed by people self-selecting where they live based on that identity and algorithms on social media that feed people information designed to mislead them or make them angry.

“When people believe climate change is not real and they believe Donald Trump won the presidency in 2020 … it’s very difficult to reach consensus,” he said.

Some things didn’t work

With time running out in the interview, Inslee finally gets around to talking about “disappointments” of his 12 years – the only failure he would concede was not bringing donuts to his communications staff often enough – and both involved his clashes with legislators.

“I’ve tried things along the way that didn’t work,” he said. “I’m human.”

In 2013, the Legislature was wrestling with a decision on building a new bridge for Interstate 5 across the Columbia River. Inslee invited U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican in the Obama administration who had previously been a Congressman with Inslee.

Inslee took LaHood to the Senate Republican Caucus meeting, where he offered federal money to help with the $3.4 billion project if the Legislature could put some money in the Transportation Budget they were drafting. The Republicans didn’t just say no, they said, “heck, no” and released a videotape of the exchange on a website.

“They just ripped him up, so that didn’t work,” he said. The partisan standoff over the bridge helped sink the transportation budget that year.

As the Legislature was in the middle of a budget standoff near the end of the 2016 session, Inslee said he would start vetoing other bills they passed if they didn’t pass an operating budget. When a budget didn’t pass, he called them back into a special session and vetoed 27 other bills – which he described as “worthy,” and many of which had bipartisan support.

“Just as a statement,” he said last week. “Just to shake things up. That didn’t work.”

It still took almost two weeks to reach a budget deal – with lawmakers of both parties rankled by the vetoes – and they overrode all the vetoes before passing the budget.

After 12 years as governor, a period in which he said he “got up every day trying help Washingtonians realize their dreams,” Inslee said his future is uncertain.

He plans to stay active and would like to stay in Washington, but whether that’s in the public or private sector is undecided. He’d like to continue work expanding clean energy production and in the fight against climate change, which he sees as “the central challenge of our time.”

“I don’t believe in retiring.”