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Chris Mulick has worked for the Herald since 1998 and has served as the statehouse correspondent covering state government and politics since 2000. He works year-round out of the Herald's Olympia bureau on the state Capitol campus. Have a question? Send Chris an e-mail and he'll answer the best questions regularly. |
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closeRepublican Attorney General Rob McKenna and Democratic challenger John Ladenburg met with the Herald editorial board Tuesday and the one-term incumbent offered a noteworthy take on two notable issues.
First, he gave Gov. Chris Gregoire a bit of a break on the issue of 2004’s Initiative 297, Heart of America Northwest’s nuclear cleanup measure that’s been tossed by two federal courts.
We’ve written before about how little then Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Gregoire said about doomed measure when it was on the ballot. First she explained she was advising lawmakers on the issue when it was before the Legislature. Then she said she couldn’t say anything about it because it could undermine the state’s case should it have to defend the measure in court.
McKenna on Tuesday said he and Gregoire have talked “attorney general to attorney general” about the measure.
“She was very frustrated by I-297,” McKenna said. “She could see, other lawyers in the office could see, it had real problems with the commerce clause (of the U.S. Constitution).”
“I would have been more outspoken about its problems,” McKenna said before stopping himself. “But it’s easy for me to sit here and say that.”
He said the original district court’s ruling tossing out the measure was so broad the state had to appeal the ruling if only to assert it’s legal rights to get a better, more precise ruling.
“We had to defend it. The district court shot it down five different ways,” McKenna said.
McKenna also was asked about legislation requiring local government boards to tape their executive sessions so a judge could review them in case their legality is questioned. Local governments fought to kill the bill in this year’s legislative session. McKenna said he is open to a compromise that would make the requirement apply only to those boards which the state Auditor’s office has determined to have violated the law.
“That still provides incentive to everybody else without having to require everybody else to record executive sessions,” McKenna reasoned.
For his part, Ladenburg said he would support legislation, or a constitutional amendment, requiring the state Supreme Court to review proposed ballot measures before they are put to the public. And he said proponents of the executive session bill haven’t made enough effort to reach an agreement with local governments that all can live with.
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