Democrats want to ARREST you for WHAT?

And the thing that bothers me the most about the policy is the fact that the state agencies themselves are doing harm to the environment at scale. And there are no repercussions for those state agencies at all. So I look at that and say, what's good for the goose should be good for the gambler. Welcome back to the Fix Washington podcast, a broadcast of the House Republican Caucus. I'm your host, Peter Rubarno. And with me is one of my favorite legislators from the Ninth District. Well, one of my favorite legislators, period. But she's from Pomeroy. Mary Dye, how are you today? I'm very well, thank you, Peter. It's good to be on. It's great. I wanted to have you on from the beginning for a number of reasons. One, where's Pomeroy and where's the Ninth District? Well, Pomeroy is as far away from Olympia as you can get and still be in the state of Washington. I call it Western Idaho. But we are a very small 1,500 person town, only town in the county, Frontier County in Eastern Washington, very southeast corner next to the Wenaha Toucanan Wilderness. And you're below, you're south of Spokane area, right? We're south of the Snake River. We're just south of Lower Granite Dam. So to say the least, lots of farming and ag? Lots of farming, ag and forestry. How long you've been in the legislature? I've been on the legislature for 11 years. 11 years. And, you know, you're on one of what I would consider, because I've been on it since I was elected myself, but you're the ranking member on a really important committee, which is the Environment and Energy Committee. Yes. And I'm so glad to serve with you on this committee. It's very impactful. This is what is driving the inflation in our state is the work that we do on the Environment Committee to try and prevent these horrible bills. We are not able to stop everything because we don't have enough votes. But nonetheless, we have the Climate Commitment Act, some of the most egregious laws that you can imagine. And one of the worst ones coming up is the Environmental Crimes Bill. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about that because we had heard the Environmental Crimes Bill last year, and we were really successful in highlighting really how bad it is. And this year it's back. It's reared its head again. Yes, it is. And so that is Senate Bill 5360. And you're not holding back this year. I mean, you actually put some even graphics together to highlight to Washingtonians just how bad this bill is. And one of them actually is your employees with charges. And this is one of the ones that you have. And so tell me a little bit about what this means. What about how are employees going to be liable? You know, it changes the statute so that people who are charged with environmental crimes, it raises the penalties to even a Class B felony with up to 10 years in prison. And so you're not just the big business, but also the employees. Individual employees could be charged with environmental crimes if something that they had done in the workplace was either negligent or they knowingly broke an environmental law. And it doesn't necessarily have to show that any person has been harmed. It doesn't have to show that there was intent to harm a person. And you'll be sitting in jail with people that maybe have committed manslaughter or assault and battery for something that it really puts a chilling effect, but it puts your employees at deep legal risk. Yeah. And this, you know, our constitution doesn't give the attorney general just broad authority to prosecute. So, I mean, what I thought was interesting about this bill is it broadens this constitutional authority to really investigate, prosecute, and actually incarcerate people that way beyond those constitutional authority. Right. And people in my district could have already, so many of our farm families have experienced actions taken against them for things that may be just mother nature or something that they have done traditionally since long before the state was a state. I can think of the King family now that has caught national awareness where they had the cattle watering ponds that were developed by their ancestors back in the 1800s. And now they're facing charges by the Department of Ecology on this issue. And this bill could potentially put members of the King family in jail for a long time. Yeah. And what was interesting too, so Senate Bill 5360 is very vague. And one of the scenarios that I've heard from farmers and ranchers is that if you're, for instance, an organic rancher and you have your herd out there, and if they go pee or poop in the field, say it's even just snow or in the field, and it leeches into groundwater, that you can actually be charged with felonies. And it's not a civil fine. You can go to actual prison for years for that. Right. And I think that the problem with the bill is the part where you have to say, was this knowingly, intentionally, or whether it was negligence, and there's no clarity. So it puts everybody at risk. If this bill passes, there's not enough clarity in the statute to even define where the lines are and what is the harm. Did the cow cause harm to another human intentionally or negligently? Is someone else being physically impacted by that crime? Nope. Doesn't count that. It's very vague in the bill. I think it's a bill that poses a chilling effect across all, and particularly east of the Cascades, where so many of us have experienced. I mean, water quality issues, activist groups filing charges against to cause these civil actions from the agencies to come in. And the thing that bothers me the most about the policy is the fact that the state agencies themselves are doing harm to the environment at scale, and there are no repercussions for those state agencies at all. So I look at that and say, what's good for the goose should be good for the gander, right? And so when you have wastewater treatment effluent flowing into Puget Sound, 18 plus billion gallons a year of raw sewage outflows because of failures of regulating the wastewater treatment plants in Seattle and other places along the Puget Sound, I think that that's caused, you know, in my opinion, almost a superfund situation with the waters in the Puget Sound. The stormwater runoff that isn't being, you know, protected or cleaned. There's so many things that I look at the state where they fell short. The wildfires, they've fallen completely short on the wildfires burning across DNR land. There's so many forest management things that they failed to do. And yet they want to do this bill to hold individual citizens of Washington state and the people that work in businesses that provide the jobs, the incomes, the prosperity across the state. They want to charge individual private sector people for things that maybe they're falling short of as well. Well, and you and I have talked about this before, so it'll be good for the listeners of the Fix Washington podcast, the Bob Oak Game Farm, which is actually in my community, which is a perfect example of that. A game farm operated by the state. The pheasant discharge is getting into a critical aquifer. They are not, and don't have to comply with water discharge, the same as a private would be. Under this bill, would the state, WDFW, be liable for all that damage and could they go to prison for it? Unlikely. And here's the thing, we asked directly in committee, did Department of Ecology file charges against the Washington Fish and Wildlife for the failure of protecting that critical aquifer? And the answer was no. They did just recently ask them to file for a confined animal feeding operation permit. They didn't even know if that had been completed, but they've never been charged and you have homes in your district that actually have to put full house filtration and people have been harmed. They're actually getting sick from the contamination from the fish and wildlife game farm. There's something, right, that should have been dealt with much sooner than this. It's been in place since 1954, communities have grown up around it. The municipal well that serves 20,000 homes is being impacted or potentially could be impacted if they don't remedy this game farm. And yet, who pays the price? Is it in the employees at the game farm? Is it the agency personnel that failed to comply with Clean Water Act laws? Who's being charged with penalties at the state level? Nobody. Nobody. And public entities wouldn't be, but according to this, up to 10 years in prison for a first degree. A second degree is knowing violation would be five years in prison and gross negligence would be up to one year. Just massive, massive penalties for private individuals and their employees, but nothing for the state. Another carve out. And the process is the penalty. When these individual people get charged with an environmental crime, which there is an environmental crimes division already under the AG's office, and when they're charged, they're given a penalty already. Like they're charged with a $5 million or whatever, a $150,000 penalty or $500,000 penalty or $950,000 penalty. Then they have to get their attorneys to take their case and they have to retain them. It's a high risk operation to fight the agency and go through these administrative courts that are totally appointed and basically not accountable by the voters. The penalty is the reputational damage that they do when they file those charges against those people. The way those people often find out is when it turns up on the front page of their local paper and their reputation is destroyed. That to me is the chilling effect. The way that we administer environmental law in this state is just so damaging to the average Washingtonian. The people that build businesses, pay taxes, follow the rules as best they can, and there's no, you know, any kind of technical help to try to remedy, any offers of access to grants to try and help remedy the environmental harms. They do nothing to help people. They just charge them a huge fine. The resources that would have been needed to have corrected or remedied the problem. So, and I was going to, and you alluded to this and I was going to ask it, so Senate Bill 5360 has all these new penalties, all these new crimes are being created, but you mentioned there are already crimes for what's going on both at the state level and federal level. There's misdemeanors or civil penalties. Why do we need Senate Bill 5360 or maybe why don't we need it, right? We definitely don't need the up, up level charges against the citizens of Washington state that are trying to do the right thing, build, make a living and, you know, this, this makes a very hard, hard line in the sand that if you move sideways wrong or if an activist can charge you or find something to charge you with or blame you or turn you in, it makes no citizen, no worker safe in the state of Washington. Yeah. Well, I want to make a small little transition because another committee that you serve on is capital budget and you've served on it for as long as I've been here and you've been able to secure a lot of water bank money, some water irrigation money. You've been working on projects throughout eastern Washington. Can you talk a little bit about that because you've really been a champion for water in eastern Washington. I have been and I'm very grateful to the generosity of the capital budget because I am asking a large sums of money because it's going to take large sums of money to do what we want. But what it did was we have a project that was suspended that was promised that irrigation water would be brought to the central basin and it was suspended only half built and we found the way after the aquifer was completely depleted that we needed to replace those deep wells that they were given temporary water rights to drill deep wells in the 70s and it just drained the aquifer and it was a growth, a lot of double things, growth in the municipalities and also the irrigation. That irrigation should have been coming from the Columbia Basin Project and with the generosity of our state being able to put those monies as cost share with the federal government we've been able to deploy over 150 million dollars in construction and we've built pumped pipelines to these areas and have been able to decommission tens of thousands of acres that were in deep well irrigation and restore some of the watersheds. We've seen springs come up, we're seeing industry starting to make commitments for the growth of the industry because that secure water supply is a game changer for agriculture, it's a game changer for the economy of the state. So very happy that we've been successful and thank you again for your leadership in making sure that those funds become available so that we can do more. Right now we're really poised with the One Big Beautiful Bill. They've put a substantial pool of money in there that we can draw upon until 2036 to complete the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Project and they are moving rapidly to make that possible for us and we're very excited. So the monies that we will hopefully be able to accrue from the capital budget this year will be the one that brings that whole project to fruition and we've been waiting for 60 years like I said and to see it actually move forward is just it gives hope to the farming community but it also gets hope to communities like Moses Lake which is really growing industry and opportunity, hope to people in Othello that are really growing and prospering more than other communities that have desperately needed a secure supply of water and it really frees that aquifer up for the municipal growth as well. Well I was going to say I mean the ag community in the 9th district is lucky to have you fighting for them but really all of eastern Washington is lucky to have you fighting for them because you're able to secure a lot of this and a lot of this is then leveraged for federal funds so you're making their tax dollars stretch further plus you're really meeting the needs on an important issue and securing water helps us all because we eat the food that you grow and so it's important to western Washington as much as it's important to eastern Washington. Fundamentally it's an economic driver of the state currently we do 21 billion dollars of ag production in the state 75 percent of it is happening on the Columbia Basin project that's only half finished that that is only 14 percent of the agricultural lands and it produces 75 percent of the ag production in the state and we're poised to double that. That's amazing, that's amazing. Let's shift on one last issue because this issue is something that I hear across Washington. Affordability, affordability, affordability. People are struggling with among the highest grocery prices, the highest gas prices, highest energy costs, yet Democrats again this year are proposing an income tax. Now they proposed it in the Senate, they proposed it as a millionaire's tax, however when Senate Republicans tried to put an amendment to limit it to a million dollars and above, Senate Democrats said no. So this clearly is an income tax not a millionaire's tax. It's a gateway drug to an everybody tax. It's a gateway drug to an everybody tax, that's a good line. So tell me about, so you know what are people saying in your district about this income tax? Well our side of the state, we're people that are small business, we're farm families and it's an adjusted gross income of a million dollars and if you have a main street downtown business, if you have a regular farm, you know your adjusted gross income could easily be that and 10% of that, we don't have 10% margins in Main Street. We don't have 10% margins in agriculture. It doesn't happen and so this income tax falls on the small business and ag industry hard and there's no way that they could possibly stay in business. This year has been especially hard, especially hard in the ag industry and Main Street. Why? Because we have energy tariffs. Our state put a tariff on energy. It takes energy to produce anything in this state, to run any kind of business, even if it's a Main Street downtown storefront, you still have to pay the electrical bill and that's taking a big bite out of your profitability. It's making it hard for you to compete and the prices have gone up so much in order to cover those costs. People are just running across the border in our border communities in the Ninth District. We have troubles with people from Spokane going over to Coeur d'Alene, people from Pullman going to Moscow, people from Clarkston going over to Lewiston and we're seeing that across our districts and it's because we've made this market economies work. People can choose where they're going to purchase their goods and services and markets work because people try to buy as affordably as possible. We're making it impossible in this state to afford to live in this state. We're one of the highest cost states to live in and we're making it a lot of stress on families and I think that the income tax just says across the board, we don't want you here mom and pop. We don't want you here family farm. That's what it says to me. It says to me that we think that you owe us and it's the things that the governor said that really upset me the most was when he said yeah we'll do this income tax and we'll give it to the working family tax credit. It's like a Robin Hood policy. It doesn't make sense to me that he does not understand that it takes a lot of money in this state to run a business. Farms are 40 percent more in cost of production than the median across the United States. We're literally driving the cost of production so that we can't compete for shelf space that your local Albertsons. We can't. We're too expensive and we lose market share to people like Argentina, China, Mexico, any place but us. Right. Well your passion is easy to see and definitely love it and I know that everyone listening and watching the Fix Washington podcast loves hearing about it and will want to hear more. So representativemarydye.com is the way to go. Go to her website. You could also reach out to her by email which is mary.dye at ledge.wa.gov and I want to thank you for joining me. Well thanks for having me. It's really been fun Peter. And thank you for tuning in again to the Fix Washington podcast, a production of the House Republican Caucus and if you want to learn more about how you can help us stop the bad bills that Rep. Dye mentioned or help us fix Washington, go to houserepublicans.wa.gov. Fix Washington, a podcast from Washington House Republicans. Go to our website houserepublicans.wa.gov. Find us on Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube.