OLYMPIA — On a recent tour of the Capitol office he’ll soon depart, Gov. Jay Inslee pointed to an old nautical instrument he keeps on the wall.
The clinometer measures how much a ship is tilting as it sails through choppy waters. This one came off a retired state ferry.
Inslee mused that it’s a reminder of how he guided the state for the past 12 years.
“Every morning, I come in and the bubble shows how far you’re swinging back and forth, and I just keep that bubble right on zero — so we keep the state on an even keel,” he said.
Inslee certainly has some reasons to boast.
Politically speaking, he has been among the state’s most successful elected leaders of recent years. A former congressman who represented districts on both sides of the Cascades, he’ll leave office as the longest current-serving governor in the U.S. and the first to lead Washington for three terms since the late Dan Evans.
On his unquestioned top priority, fighting climate change and building a clean-energy economy, Inslee notched major wins, including a landmark cap-and-trade law that voters overwhelmingly endorsed in November.
But Inslee’s ferry-instrument analogy also calls to mind a rap on his tenure: that as he focused on the long-term threat of global climate change, some more immediate and local concerns festered.
Washington’s ferry system, hampered by crew shortages and failing old ships, has been, for some critics, a prime example of poor governance.
Widespread ferry trip cancellations and delays sparked enough anger that even Inslee’s successor and political ally, fellow Democrat Gov.-elect Bob Ferguson, has made ferries an example of bureaucratic failings he’ll aim to fix.
The K-12 school system, in a deep and unconstitutional funding crisis when Inslee came into office, is again teetering amid financial and enrollment woes. Homelessness and housing costs have surged. And after years of tax and spending increases, the state is facing a budget shortfall of $10 billion or more.
At 73, Inslee is grayer than when he took office in 2013. But he’s still got the optimistic guy-you’d-crack-a-beer-with demeanor that helped him repeatedly win reelection and led to his sometimes nickname, “Sunny Jay.”
In an exit interview with the Olympia press corps last month in the governor’s office, Inslee assessed his own strength as holding values that meshed with those of most Washingtonians.
“If anyone thinks about my time in office — and I don’t think people will be focused on the Inslee administration 100 years from now — I think that what I am proud of is that I was attuned to the genius of the state of Washington,” Inslee said.
“I loved Washington state when I started. I love her more now. I hope people really think he understood the value system and the genius of the state of Washington and was able to raise the ambitions of Washingtonians to do even more than we thought we could do.”
Inslee has also touted his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began here with the first confirmed case in the U.S. and ended with Washington seeing one of the nation’s lowest death rates. If Washington had the same pandemic death rate as Mississippi, Inslee has frequently reminded people, 18,000 more people would have died.
Inslee said he’s also proud of Washington’s paid family leave law, which he said has had people thanking him for helping them decide to have children.
When asked about any regrets, he jokingly said he should have brought more doughnuts for his communications staff.
He then acknowledged only that he’d at times made “tactical” mistakes, such as vetoing nearly 30 bills one day during his first term to try to break a legislative impasse on the budget. It didn’t work.
On Washington’s homelessness crisis, a subject he didn’t focus on until late in his tenure, Inslee acknowledged frustration, but argued “I don’t think you can point to any other governor who has asked more and done more to address this crisis.”
He pointed to increased spending on mental health services and housing, and to a program he initiated that has cleared dozens of homeless encampments from the sides of freeways and moved campers into housing.
Some longtime Democratic lawmakers credit Inslee with doggedly sticking to his pursuit of climate policies to reduce state greenhouse gas emissions, overcoming numerous obstacles, including court decisions and failed carbon tax initiatives.
“He can retire feeling huge pride, deserved pride, in knowing he has really made a difference in charting a path in how to make this work of combating climate change and reducing carbon emissions politically feasible,” said state Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle.
The state now has the Climate Commitment Act, which requires the largest polluters to buy permits for their emissions, and then eventually ratchet emissions down toward a net-zero goal by 2050. The permits generate billions of dollars that are flowing to environmental and community projects.
In addition, Inslee signed into law a clean fuels standard, a law ridding Washington’s electric grid of power from fossil fuels by 2045, and a mandate for all new passenger cars and trucks to run on electric or other zero-emissions technology by 2030.
Republicans frequently criticized Inslee’s climate and tax policies for making the state less affordable and swelling the size of government. Since Inslee’s first year in office, the general fund operating budget has more than doubled, going from about $33.6 billion in the 2013-15 biennium to $72 billion in the current two-year budget.
Bill Bryant, the former Port of Seattle commissioner who was the Republican challenger to Inslee in 2016, said Inslee’s three terms in office won’t compare favorably with those of Evans, the Republican governor from 1965 to 1977.
Evans was regarded as the leader of an entire political movement of “Evans Republicans” and founded the state’s community college system.
“Dan Evans had Rushmore legacy; what are we going to remember from the Inslee years?” Bryant said. “I think it’s 12 lost years.”
J.T. Wilcox, the former state House Republican leader, credited Inslee as a skilled retail politician who can work a roomful of strangers.
He recalled with appreciation Inslee visiting him at his farm in the Yelm area after he took the GOP leadership post, and charming a family gathering there with his friendly banter.
“He has got a few secret weapons. He has what I call a goofy charm,” Wilcox said.
But Wilcox said he was frequently bothered by Inslee’s partisan penchant for publicly blasting Republicans when he could have sought more common ground.
“The thing that I just really, really despise about him is this instinct to just start blaming people,” he said.
A knock on Inslee expressed at times even by Democrats is that he wasn’t as skilled of a legislative dealmaker as his predecessor, Gov. Christine Gregoire, who was known for personally brokering compromises on thorny issues. Especially if the subject was not climate policy.
“We all know environment was his big issue,” said longtime former state Rep. Eileen Cody, D-Seattle. “You knew where he was going to put all his energy.”
But Cody, who worked mainly on health care issues, credited Inslee for being supportive of policies such as a public health insurance option he signed into law.
“He always had good staff in his policy office that would work with us,” she said.
Former state Sen. Karen Keiser, a Democrat from Des Moines who served 28 years in the Legislature, said Inslee “came a long way” from when he arrived in 2013.
“I think he had a rocky start,” she said, citing relationships with lawmakers. “His first term was difficult and had some real problems. But that was a long time ago. He learned on the job and got better.”
As Inslee hands over the governor’s office to Ferguson this week, he’ll give one last “State of the State” address to a joint session of the state House and Senate.
He said he does not know what comes next for him, joking with reporters, “I’m going to start a newspaper — you know, Jay’s news.”
Growing more serious, he said he doesn’t yet have specific plans, “except that it does not include retirement.”
“I intend to keep working, and I will be trying to ask where can I be most effective in fighting climate change and building clean energy — the clean energy economy that I’ve had a vision for a long time.”
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