Another example of bureaucratic myopia in Olympia is uncovered in Bryan Myrick’s column today at Red County.  Here’s a sample:

On Monday, Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law House Bill 1138, legislation that requires businesses with more than three employees on duty to provide public access to their employee bathrooms. The original bill – sponsored by a coalition of House Democrats – was limited to meeting the specific needs of people with illnesses such as Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Often without warning, people suffering from those conditions experience sudden bouts of incontinence in places that are far away from public restrooms. It should be common courtesy for business owners to accommodate people in such a state of distress, but, since some do not, a law may have been the proper way to deal with the unique circumstantial need of some citizens.

If left as a law requiring businesses to offer their employee-only facilities to people for whom the choice of holding it was not available, it might be a reasonable response to a problem that I will assume has been judged to be of widespread and pressing concern to require the imposition of one more law on businesses in Washington state. But, at a time when Olympia was busy struggling to find a way to legislate passing the buck on the state’s budget crisis, leaving the bathroom access bill just wasn’t an option. To be fair, with their intimate knowledge on the subject of being bursting at the seams with fecal matter, this may have been an issue only the state legislature had the experience to tackle.

All kidding aside, just as scatologists (experts in the study of feces) analyze the droppings of living things to gain a wealth of insights to the animal’s overall health, the bathroom access bill signed into law gives us a unique opportunity to observe the unhealthy state of the body politic in Olympia. By allowing an innocuous bill to mutate without much debate about the negative implications of its enactment, Gregoire and the state legislature have offered Republicans one more tool to show Washington voters the brand of clumsy policymaking that can be expected from a Democrat-dominated government.

Read the rest of this piece and many more excellent articles on regional and national politics at Red County (http://www.redcounty.com).

###

Popularity: 1% [?]