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King County
Executive Office
Ron Sims, King County Executive 701 Fifth Ave. Suite 3210 Seattle, WA 98104 Phone: 206-296-4040 Fax: 206-296-0194 TTY Relay: 711

May 22, 2006

Featured speeches given by County Executive, Ron Sims

Executive Sims delivers the State of the CountyState of the County
Ron Sims
May 22, 2006

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome, honorable Council Chair Phillips, honorable members of the council, Prosecutor Maleng, Sheriff Rahr, Superior Court Presiding Judge Trickey, District Court Presiding Judge Harn, Assessor Noble, department directors, King County employees, honored guests including the honorable:

  • Mayor Will Ibershof, City of Duvall
  • Mayor Jim Lauinger, City of Kirkland
  • Mayor Cathy VonWald, City of Woodinville
  • Mayor Bill Paulsen, City of Carnation
  • Deputy Mayor Laurie Clinton, City of Carnation
  • Mayor Matt Larson, City of Snoqualmie
  • Mayor Mike Park, City of Federal Way
  • Mayor John Wise, City of Enumclaw
  • Mayor Jean Garber, City of Newcastle
  • Mayor Bryan Cairns, City of Mercer Island

And representatives from the King County Unincorporated Area Councils:

  • Rick Spence, President, Four Creeks Community Council
  • Jim English, President, Vashon Maury Community Council
  • Kevin Coughlin, Member, Upper Bear Creek Community Council
  • Geoff Clayton, President, Upper Bear Creek Community Council
  • Edie Jorgensen, Treasurer, Four Creeks Community Council

I would also like to single out two great labor leaders here today: Dave Freiboth of the King County Labor Council and Chris Elwell of the Seattle and King County Building Trades. Welcome.

And most importantly, to the people of King County, I offer my greetings and heartfelt thanks. It is truly a pleasure and an honor to hold office as a public servant in a region so blessed with natural advantages and with such a rich diversity of intellectual firepower and human capital.

I’m pleased to declare the state of Martin Luther King Jr. County is excellent. And by the end of the year, it will be even better, as we begin to implement a plan to bring basic health care coverage to the low income children in this county that lack it.

I will offer more details in a moment, but let me say at the outset that our financial house is in order, our budgets are balanced, and our bond ratings are among the best in the country. Our government is newly streamlined and more efficient than it has ever been. King County is known for its innovation and stands at the national forefront of positive change and reforms on a vast array of issues, from pandemic flu preparedness to critical areas conservation. As a region, our economy is growing again, and is creating well paid jobs.
Our private sector is robust, as our leading companies, operating on the razor’s edge of technological and cultural innovation, enter into a new era of sustained growth.

Given the great advantages we have at our disposal, our future looks brighter now than it has in years. We have persevered through difficult times and lean years of economic recession and belt tightening without compromising the values of community, compassion, and collaboration that imbue this region with its distinct identity. We have made tough choices and weathered the storm stronger, leaner, and better seasoned to face a series of new challenges that we see before us.

Often when I talk about King County to those unfamiliar with our region or our government, I describe us as a living laboratory, a place where exciting policy experiments are perfected and then exported around the country. We are the place where innovation is birthed, and the new ideas that result are translated into concrete advances that affect the ways in which we live, work, and play. This is a place of intellectual energy married to entrepreneurial drive put in service of the common good, and where optimism thrives and no problem is seen as beyond the ability of enlightened human reason to solve.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

In that spirit I have stood before you in years past and made bold promises. Today I can report those promises made were promises kept.

  • I said we would reduce our costs for employee healthcare without reducing benefits. We are delivering on that promise. In January, nearly 90 percent of King County employees and their dependents took charge of their health and enrolled in our Healthy Incentives effort, a level that stunned national experts. We expect the program to shave $40 million from the county’s health care costs over the next three years.
  • Now, while I have a captive audience of so many elected officials from across the county, I want to issue you a challenge. Later this summer, we will be issuing a countywide health challenge, in which teams of participants compete to earn points for adopting healthy alternatives like eating smart and exercising.
  • We should never ask our employees to do what we are unwilling to do ourselves, so I call today for the elected leaders in the room to commit themselves to participating in this challenge. It will be good for you, and you will be setting a positive example for the rest of the county to emulate.
  • The Puget Sound Health Alliance is thriving. It now encompasses over a 100 public and private organizations representing over 900,000 covered lives across the central Puget Sound region. By implementing an innovative quality improvement approach that harnesses the power of market forces to reform and realign incentives in health care, and by making a deeper investment in health information technology, the Alliance is increasingly cited in national health care policy circles as a model for the nation that will simultaneously control costs while delivering higher quality care.
  • I promised we would continue sound fiscal policies that made us one of the few local governments in the nation with Triple A bond ratings And we have delivered on that promise.
  • Just last month Standard and Poor’s upgraded King County’s wastewater bonds, thereby dropping the interest we are paying to finance our state-of-the-art $1.6 billion Brightwater sewage treatment project and other projects. As a result, we are lowering our proposed sewer rate for next year. This welcome news will save taxpayers millions.
  • I promised that we would locate new efficiencies and increase the productivity of our departments. We have done just that. In February 2005, we launched KingStat, a dynamic performance audit management tool that is helping us sharpen the operations of our government. It will go into full implementation this year. KingStat will ensure that whether it is on-time bus performance, the speedy issuance of development permits, or widening the scope of our immunization programs, problems are solved and results are achieved.
  • We promised we would improve Elections. And we have. No fewer than three, independent, outside reviews has praised King County Elections for all of the progress we have made in implementing operational improvements and reducing errors since 2004, and our hard work continues.
  • Now we have proposed a detailed plan to for King County to transition to all-mail balloting by 2007. The proposal, which will make us the largest single jurisdiction in the nation to conduct all-mail balloting, is now before the council. I am confident that once you have a chance to study the details of the plan, which will improve transparency and accountability while further reducing errors and the opportunity for fraud, you will approve the effort.
  • I said we would avoid a building moratorium and protect our waters from pollution. In April we officially broke ground on Brightwater, the first major expansion of our wastewater system in 40 years.
  • I promised to launch a regional water supply plan designed to insulate us from the chronic seasonal drought that climate scientists are warning will result from the sharp decline in cascade snow pack. And we have.
  • Brightwater includes a 26 million dollar King County investment in a reclaimed water backbone system to provide 21 million gallons of drought-proof water supply each day
  • I promised we’d invest in parks, trails, forests and open space to get people healthier and preserve our rural areas and our rivers, lakes and streams. And we have.
  • In the last year, King County has authorized over 90 million dollars worth of investment in parks, trails, open space, and habitat protection in King and Snohomish counties. We have made the single largest down payment on environmental preservation in the history of the government.
  • We’ve also coordinated an unprecedented regional partnership with other governments, businesses and media companies to make sure that in an emergency, people at all levels throughout the community know what’s going on and what to do to keep our transportation system, ports, vital utilities and our industries safe. King County Emergency Management Director Eric Holdeman has become nationally-recognized for his expertise in a regional approach to emergency preparedness, planning, and coordination.
  • I promised I would reinvest in the future of our rural areas. And we have. In 2005 we focused on rural outreach. Farmers, foresters, and rural residents told us what they needed and we compiled it in our Rural Economic Strategies Report. We are now implementing the actions outlined in that report so we keep our rural areas vibrant and dynamic. And my 2007 budget will containa major commitment to the economy, lifestyle and governance of our cherished rural areas.
  • I promised we would end homelessness in ten years. We have made a remarkable leap in our first year by securing millions of federal, state and voter approved dollars. Hundreds of housing units will be built this year. Our Passage Point effort will renovate the old Cedar Hills facility and convert it into 75 units of housing and support services to reunite women recovering from mental illness or addiction with their children. Our JumpStart challenge grants will leverage millions of dollars to convert old motels into low income housing around the county.
  • And we are creating 25 units to house the chronically homeless in South King County. Ending homelessness will be a top priority of mine this year and every year until we have placed a roof over every bed.

Each of you holds in your hands a record of King County’s accomplishments for the past year. As you look through it, you can be proud of King County government, its employees and the services they deliver. We have a contract with King County voters to deliver them the best and most efficient service in the nation. It is a high bar, but we are meeting that obligation.

We can do so because of an extraordinary partnership between King County and organized labor. While much of the public and private sector struggle to find common ground between workers and management we have overcome that challenge here. Our advances in health care, service delivery and cost containment have only been achieved because of the leadership and creativity of King County’s labor unions, and I want to express my heartfelt thanks to them and to all of our employees.

The work we do together has justifiably earned our county a national reputation for excellence and innovation. We can all be proud of our achievements.

But I have challenged our departments to not just deliver services needed today but to look to the future. I have asked them to envision what King County will look like in the year 2050.

By 2050, we know that we will be much larger, adding 300,000 new faces to our current 1.8 million residents, the equivalent of adding another Pierce County to our population. We know our population will be older, straining our already creaky health care system. We know that without investments in transportation, particularly in transit, we will soon be mired in gridlock that will choke our economy. And we know our winters will be warmer and wetter, and we will experience flooding and drought.

So what actions do we take today to make sure the quality of life in 2050 is as good or better than it is now?

For a regional leader such as King County, I believe the first answer to that question lies in how we meet the two greatest challenges facing us today: the ominous advance of global warming, and the irresponsible withdrawal of the federal government which has all but abandoned both its duty to provide a safety net for our poorest and our youngest, and to protect citizens from catastrophic emergencies.

Today I will offer you tangible, attainable solutions, solutions to those problems that we can implement now.

Simply put, every low-income child, every child of the working poor, will have health insurance coverage. In upcoming months, I will propose a targeted, cost-effective plan to offer health care coverage to almost all of the 16,000 children in this county who currently go without it. That so many children in this, one of the wealthiest regions in the nation, go without coverage is a blot on our record as a community.

To combat climate change, today I announce the Global Warming Team, a strike force led by my office and drawing from the expertise of every department. The team is specifically devoted to dealing with the crucial work we must do to mitigate and adapt to the mounting impacts of global warming. I created this group six months ago on a temporary basis. We will now make it permanent, as we prepare King County for warming temperatures, rising sea levels, more severe flooding, and chronic seasonal water shortages.

Ideopolis

Why is it the role of King County to tackle these twin challenges? Over my tenure as County Executive, I have been struck by the evolution of this metropolitan area into a region of national, and even global, significance. Seattle continues to be a city of international stature, but cities like Bellevue, Woodinville, Kirkland, Renton, Auburn and Kent are growing by leaps and bounds and establishing their own strong identities and reputations.

And as I watched this change, I am convinced we are transitioning into a ‘metropolitan century,’ a period when economic shifts and urban growth will place regional governments at the center of a profound evolution to collaborative governance. This evolution makes regional entities like King County, with the capacity for long-term planning and coordination, the catalysts of progress.

Nothing exemplifies this opportunity better than the remarkable success of the Puget Sound Health Alliance. When the Alliance formed in 2004, we did not know what to expect. In a remarkably short time, it has grown into a major force, including governments like the state of Washington, non-profits and major private employers like Boeing and Starbucks, labor unions, and the region’s most important health care providers and insurers.

Backed by a sound reform plan and sustained political will, the success of the Alliance to date illustrates our ability to knit together a seamless partnership that cuts across traditional stakeholders’ boundaries in the pursuit of much needed reforms. The Alliance is at the cusp of a remarkable reformation of health care over the next year. Very soon it will have its own unique, transparent community data base, the first of its kind in the nation. The key to system-wide improvement in health care is having timely, robust, transparent, population-based data to track quality and costs and monitor trends in public health and chronic diseases.
Having its own data base will allow the Alliance to achieve a state-of-the-art health care system that achieves better care, healthier people, and affordable costs.

That this sort of major reform effort would develop and take root in a place like King County, where we boast a wealth of both public and private sector talent is no accident. Rather, it is the wave of the future. King County is at the forefront of this shift to what some leading cultural and economic experts have dubbed the era of the ideopolis.

What is an ideopolis? Literally, the term means “city of ideas.” They are the growing metropolitan areas to which talent is choosing to migrate. They are culturally diverse and vibrant areas open to new ideas and committed to innovative technological and entrepreneurial innovations that will power our economy in this new century.

These regions are the great new engines of wealth creation and progress. They are the expanding metropolitan areas that have embraced the economic and cultural spirit of this emerging century: places like Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, Minnesota. And I don’t need to tell you that this region is the very embodiment of the term.

With so much talent and such a wealth of knowledge at our disposal, King County truly represents the land of opportunity in 21st century America. But with so much privilege comes immense responsibility. And when the federal government recedes, that responsibility falls on our shoulders, as the government that controls the levers of regional authority. It is our duty to lead the way in forging new and necessary advances in how we take care of our people, and how we govern ourselves.

Covering Children

That new duty starts with our children.

The Chilean Poet Gabriela Mistral said it best. “Many things can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, his mind is being developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.”

In that spirit, Governor Christine Gregoire has set a dramatic goal for the state of Washington. She has called upon all of us to provide every child in the state with health insurance by 2010. Today, I am announcing that King County is answering that call. We are in the midst of launching an effort that will bring basic health coverage to almost all of the 16,000 children in King County who are currently without it.

And we will accomplish this task without raising taxes on the people of King County.

There are two things that every parent hopes to offer their children: unconditional love and good health. Unfortunately, given the high cost of health care, not all parents can afford to provide both. That is why the state and federal governments have created programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to fill the gap for lower income kids.

Those programs have proven to be successful, but they have weakened in the past few years. With the state budget cutbacks of recent years, outreach activities necessary to locate and enroll the children eligible for these programs have atrophied. State Medicaid enrollments of children are slipping, falling well short of projections. But that is not an indication of declining need so much as it is a warning that far too many children who qualify for these programs are falling through the cracks. Meanwhile, budgeted slots in these programs are going unfilled.

Here King County has an important opportunity to once again be the living lab of innovation. We will be the pilot and the model for how the rest of the state can meet the lofty bar set by Governor Gregoire.

The first phase of our effort will be simple, and even has the potential to save the county money. Existing programs cover children up to 250 percent of the federal poverty line, yet an estimated 8,000 eligible children in King County are not enrolled. I will propose funding perhaps a half dozen outreach staff and community health workers who are trusted communicators to help navigate the enrollment process and to sign up these 8,000 children for the coverage they qualify for, and to connect them to primary care that is accessible, continuous, comprehensive, family centered, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective. It is not only the right thing to do, it is the financially prudent thing to do.

Each year King County already treats 2,700 uninsured children at our health clinics at a cost of $3.7 million annually. Enrolling these uninsured children into current programs and getting them the necessary preventive care and medical services, will save money in the long run. Enrolling these children will also bring new state and federal dollars flowing to Children’s Hospital, and all other hospitals and clinics that currently treat those without health care.

The other 8,000 children, living primarily in families above 250 percent of poverty level will be addressed in phase two of the plan. They present a more difficult policy problem.

I have convened a Children’s Health and Access Task Force that has been working for months on developing affordable solutions for covering for these kids. It includes many of the region’s leading experts on children’s health care. It is co-chaired by Maxine Hayes, the state health officer for the state of Washington and Ben Danielson of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinc, and includes representatives of Children’s Hospital and Harborview among others. The task force’s work indicates that finding a way to extend basic coverage for children living in financially squeezed lower-middle class families could by itself take care of half the children in this group.

As the task force completes its work, we will present phase two of our plan by the time we roll out our 2007 budget this fall. But I can assure you today that we have the resources available at our disposal to cover the vast majority of the uninsured children of King County at a modest cost. We have the means, and now we must have the will.

The children of King County must have adequate health care. There is no more obvious test of our moral fiber as a society than how we treat our most vulnerable children. We have failed this test in the past. Let us act now to ensure that all of our children can look forward to a healthy future.

Global Warming

The other challenge is climate change. Global warming is advancing at an alarming rate, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. Climate scientists tell us that because of our unique weather patterns and proximity to major water bodies, we will feel the impacts of change earlier and more severely than in most other places. They agree that King County will see warmer, wetter winters with more rain and less snow, and hotter, drier summers punctuated by chronic drought. That alarming forecast has profound implications on the health of our citizens, our environment and our economy.

For this reason I have resurrected a concept l first advocated in 1988 when County Councilmember Bruce Laing and I proposed an Office of Global Warming. Imagine the head start we would have if we had been successful then. But we weren’t.

One newspaper editorialized against the office, dismissing us for emitting “hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas and “sky-is-falling, icecaps-are-melting, oceans-are-rising rhetoric.”

It is tough to blame that paper. Sadly, they were simply reflecting the majority view held at the time. Now, 18 years later, the scientific consensus is now overwhelming. Our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising. Many experts believe we are less than a decade away from the point of no return. Solving this problem is the moral obligation of this generation.

And regional governments such as King County are part of the solution.

That is why I am announcing King County’s Global Warming Team. This task force of county employees has been specifically charged with preparing this region for the impacts of climate change. The team includes many of the county’s finest technical, scientific and planning minds. They have been charged with revising the county’s policies and vetting its new initiates to ensure that we are maximizing our efforts to be prepared for the changes we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt are looming on the horizon.

We are already realizing the fruits of their labor. In March I signed four Executive Orders based on the work of the team committing King County to lower carbon emissions, greater use of advanced technology, new energy policies and the increased use of biodiesel.

And thanks to the determined work of the Global Warming Team we have a unique opportunity to harness the power of the market to aid us in this effort. I have just sent you an ordinance authorizing King County to join the Chicago Climate Exchange, where governments and major corporations trade carbon emissions as they seek to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. This agreement will make us the first county and the first bus system in the nation to join. Council Chair Larry Phillips is sponsoring this legislation, which will give us a seat at the table as the nation gets ready to write the future rules for capping carbon emissions. I urge its swift adoption. The Global Warming Team will recommend further actions throughout the year and as part of my 2007 proposed budget.

Transit Now

All experts agree that the single most important thing we can do to reduce greenhouse gases is to reduce vehicle miles traveled. The best way to do this is to create an efficient, comprehensive public transit system.
In fact, the first recommendation of the green ribbon climate change commission convened by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels was to increase the supply of “frequent, reliable and convenient public transportation” by “moving buses and trains more frequently through high-use areas.” My Transit Now proposal does just that.

And this is one of those happy instances when economic necessity and environmental need go hand-in-hand. On transportation, we need to take action anyway to ensure that our Metro bus system will be able to meet the demands of expected growth. With our region expected to experience 22 percent job growth over the next decade, the funding restrictions imposed by I-695 will allow Metro to grow only five percent. In this new era of tight energy supplies, high gas prices, and congested roadways, we can not afford to allow our transit system to lose ground.

The Transit Now plan I will soon send to council will expand bus service on 35 core routes and will create five new bus rapid transit routes on major transportation corridors around the county. It will support our future economic growth as it enables us to cut our damaging greenhouse gas emissions. It is truly a win-win for the people of King County. I urge the council to approve swiftly this plan, so it can be put before voters this November.

Unfortunately, even becoming carbon neutral will not stop global warming. We must accommodate ourselves to the reality that climate change is already upon us and is likely to accelerate in upcoming decades.

We must plan ahead. In these past few weeks, New England experienced its worst flooding in 70 years; anything similar here could be devastating to King County’s aging system of 500 levees and revetments along 115 miles of riverbank. The Green River levee system alone protects thousands of homes, downtown and industrial sections of Kent, Tukwila and Renton, and more than $4 billion dollars in infrastructure.

Southcenter Mall, dozens of factories, warehouses and businesses like Boeing are at risk. Add major transportation corridors and jobs lost, and serious flooding in south King County would cripple our region’s economy. There are very real risks to these levees today that will only be compounded when global warming creates episodes of more frequent and severe flooding.

We are looking at several options to deal with this problem, including the creation of a flood control district to finance major upgrades in our aging levees and buyouts of homes and businesses in floodplains. Katrina taught us that it is critical for us to maintain levees like the ones that protect homes in the Snoqualmie Valley and businesses in the Kent Valley. The experience of Boston only reinforces this lesson.

This global warming response and mitigation effort is too important to be done in an ad hoc, reactive way. This work is key to the quality of life for all of us, and particularly to the generations not yet born. We need the sustained, interdisciplinary focus on global warming that cuts across the silos of our departments. I ask that the council act swiftly on the recommendations of the Global Warming Team as they emerge. The time to defer, or delay, or deny is over.

Conclusion

Acting with foresight is never easy. Moving boldly to anticipate problems invariably opens us up to attacks from naysayers. It is always easier to criticize than to correct. Too often political leaders try to pretend that difficult problems do not exist, and concentrate instead on those things that provide maximum short-term advantage. But that is not how I have governed during my long career in public service. I believe we must do what is right, not what is expedient.
I believed that in 1988, when I raised alarms about the threat of global warming, and I still believe that today.

President John F. Kennedy once said “The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.” I call upon all of you to join me in building greatly.

It is our task to ensure that succeeding generations will enjoy the same opportunities, and be inspired by the same dream. We owe them nothing less.

Thank you.

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  Updated: Oct. 17, 2005