Article by Erik Smith. Published on Wednesday, June 21, 2011 EST.
No Sense Waiting, Says Puyallup Republican, While Kastama Contemplates Bid for Secretary of State
State Rep. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup.
UPDATED 3 p.m. with comments from Dammeier.
By Erik Smith
Staff writer/ Washington State Wire
OLYMPIA, June 22.—State Rep. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup, says he’s going to run for the Senate seat that may be vacated by longtime Democratic lawmaker Jim Kastama in his bid for secretary of state.
And so another domino falls. Lawmakers are lining things up more than a year in advance for the races that will appear on the 2012 ballot. Dammeier said Wednesday that he has been thinking about a Senate bid for quite a while, and Kastama’s decision Monday to move up or out means there’s no sense in waiting.
“Jim’s announcement probably expedited my decision and announcement, but I am running for the Senate in 2012,” he said.
There’s one hitch – Kastama’s bid for higher office isn’t a for-sure deal. Kastama said Monday that his decision depends on whether Republican Sam Reed vacates the office. Reed hasn’t announced yet whether he’s moving on, though a decision is expected before the end of the month. But Dammeier said that doesn’t affect his decision. He’s running for Senate no matter what.
Education Spokesman in the House
Dammeier announced his decision Wednesday night at a meeting of 25th District Republicans. First elected in 2008 in what is widely considered one of the state’s top swing districts, Dammeier is the ranking Republican on the House Education Committee and has been the House Republican point-man on education issues. He previously served on the Puyallup School Board and the Puyallup Planning Commission. During the just-completed legislative session, Dammeier was a frequent critic of Democratic budget priorities that he said failed to put basic education first, as the state constitution requires. “I thought we didn’t prioritize K-12 funding appropriately,” he said, “both in the magnitude of the cut they took, which I thought was out of line with our constitutional priority, and then how we did the cut in some instances, which made it worse.
What the state wound up doing, he said, is to shunt a big portion of the state’s budget woes onto its 295 school districts. A 1.9 percent pay cut for teachers, for instance, will result in “kind of a toxic relationship between administrators, principals and teachers.
Dammeier is a partner in Print NW, a commercial printing business. Printing is a family tradition: His great grandfather convinced bankruptcy receivers to allow him to take control of the firm where he worked, and the business remained in family hands, diversifying into printing software in the 1980s and employing 620 at its peak. Dammeier sold the business in 1998, but when the non-compete clause in his contract exprired in 2002, he launched his current business in partnership with three former employees. The firm is now expanding from its orignal location in downtown Puyallup to a location near the intersection of Interstate 5 and Highway 512 in Tacoma.
The experience colors his view of the business and labor issues that frequently are debated in the Legislature. Small-business frustrations with taxes and regulation are something he experiences on a daily basis, he said. “I have experienced that both as a business owner and as a legislator. I see a lot of people that come and talk to me about their frustrations with workers’ comp, but I experience them in our business as well,” he said.
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