State Politics: Teachers Pour $3.2M into State Politics; Legislators angle for a Raise

The Washington Education Association dropped $3.2 million into Washington State politics in the past six weeks, bringing the powerful teachers’ union’s total spending in the arena this year to more than $5M.

Here’s why you should care about this: We’ve been tracking the WEA’s influence on the state’s politics since the Observer’s earliest days, but this year is especially high-stakes. The union has been on a winning streak both politically and in the policy arena, most notably in the passage of the state’s new income tax on its highest earners. The lion’s share of state revenue winds up in teachers’ bank accounts, which means the tax can be viewed as particularly effective labor negotiation. They’re spending to make sure all of that sticks.

Here’s a look at their spending, per its latest filings with the Public Disclosure Commission.

At $3M, the WEA is the biggest donor to No on I-645, the campaign against the initiative that would repeal the tax. As we’ve noted, that committee has a massive cash advantage over the campaign for the initiative.

They’ve sent $450,000 to New Direction, the PAC that works to preserve and grow the progressive Democratic majorities in the Legislature, which looks primed to win five or more seats currently held by Republicans. New Direction is also spending heavily to unseat a handful of Democratic lawmakers who opposed the income tax.

The WEA poured an additional $350K into a sub-PAC of its own, Strong Schools PAC, which is playing in two key D-on-D matches. It’s backing incumbent Rep. Gerry Pollet, who faces an interesting challenger in Will Dreher in North Seattle’s 46th Legislative District. And most tellingly, it’s backing the challenge to House Education Committee Chair Sharon Tomiko Santos, the longest-serving member of the House, in South Seattle’s 37th LD.

It’s also given $210K to the Kennedy Fund, the PAC controlled by Senate Democrats, $200K to the Truman Fund, controlled by House Democrats, and $100K to Beware The Attack On Our Courts, a PAC supporting four sitting justices on the Supremes and one progressive candidate for an open seat on the court. Oh, and it made $2,400 double-maximum contributions to dozens of members of the Legislature.

Where does all this cash come from, you ask? Strength in numbers. Some of it comes from WEA-PAC, which wields voluntary donations from union members. The rest comes from the union’s regular coffers, which come from its members’ dues. There are some 90K members of the union, which works out to about $56 per member.

By comparison, Let’s Go Washington, the conservative initiative machine that is a frequent WEA antagonist, spent $3.9M putting three ballot measures, including the income tax repeal, on the ballot this year. But LGW is largely tapped out, moneywise, and appears to lack the financial resources to campaign heavily for the measures.

The WEA is already the 800-pound gorilla of Washington politics, but if things go its way next month, look for it to become even more dominant in the future.

PQ

Electeds angle for a raise

By Tim Gruver

A cadre of electeds recently made this high-level case to the citizens commission managing their salaries on why they deserve a raise: Life in office is getting expensive.

Unfortunately for them, the taxpayers on that very commission had quite the counterargument. Everyone else has bills, too.

The aforementioned parties gave each other an earful on all that at a Wednesday meeting where the Washington Citizens’ Commission on Salaries for Elected Officials heard vociferous appeals to that effect from higher ups in state government.

Among the louder voices at the proverbial table were representatives with the state’s judiciary who tried to upsell the commission on base salary hikes of 3% per year plus cost-of-living adjustments. The last six years of inflation alone, one representative told commissioners, had gutted the real value of judicial salaries by some $10,000. Without the carrots above, they warned, the creature comforts of corporate life are more than likely to steal Washington’s inimitable legal minds.

As for how the commission could justify those pay raises to taxpayers when other state workers aren’t getting one, judicial representatives claimed they already bit a big enough bullet waiting this long for even asking.

“You get what you pay for” was the crux of State Auditor Pat McCarthy’s pitch. For her part, McCarthy came duly armed with stats on all the fraud, waste and abuse she’s caught over the years.¹ But the office’s responsibilities have recently expanded tenfold into such realms as cybersecurity, cleaner-energy compliance, and policing — all at a high cost. Fraud investigations, McCarthy said, have shot up 54% from 2024 to 2025, along with a 302% increase in missing public funds investigations.

She stressed the issue at hand wasn’t her own paycheck,² but whether the position would keep its sheen for future candidates.

The very notion of jacking up any elected’s salaries — especially now — spurred much gnashing of teeth among the commission. Voter backlash notwithstanding, commissioners debated whether across the board raises for any electeds would amount to a rob Peter to pay Paul scenario, at least until lawmakers backfill the state’s $4-6 billion budget hole. For that matter, no one at the table argued pay hikes would buy different results from their respective officeholders.

Beyond the immediate requests for raises, commissioners spent considerable oxygen questioning how salaries should be calculated in the first place. Some argued that the commission needed better market comparisons, data and clearer metrics to do that. And when it comes down to performance evaluations, whether you get to hold office is a simple yes/no question that’s largely up to the voters.

And if workload really is what the state should go by to dictate pay, commissioners questioned, what about the full-time work performed by lawmakers?

To that end, the commissioners brought up a 2003 opinion by then-Washington State Attorney General Christine Gregoire recommending the commission consider economic conditions and state budget constraints when setting salaries.

Gov. Bob Ferguson and state Attorney General Nick Brown are in the No-Raises Club following the commission’s Thursday vote. Ferguson and Brown make $234K and $221K, respectively. The governor, in a bit of #irony, has been slow to offer a raises to some of the state’s seafaring employees.

As for the electeds under the rotunda, the commission tried and failed to deny lawmakers a raise. The motion died by a 7-15 vote. We’ll note that lawmakers did get a 14% yearly pay hike back in the rip-roaring times of 2024.

The unpaid citizens commission is slated to spend the next few months taking public comment on the above until February when they’re expected to take final action. Legally, their decisions are lawmaker-proof and can’t be changed by the Legislature.

For his part, Lt. Gov. Denny Heck³ took a hard pass on a pay bump in a letter to commissioners, specifically asking them not to give him one in light of the lean times ahead for our fair state. The commission didn’t give him one on Thursday