1. Mike McGinn will announce he’s running for mayor today.
2. Environmentalists and Democratic leadership in Olympia will reach a compromise on the I-937 bill this week.
3. The state Senate will not release its budget this week.
4. Testifying in court papers in a case about the Building Industry Association of Washington’s workers comp fund, a dean and professor of accounting at the U.W.’s business school accuses the BIAW of things like “misappropriating” and “commingling” funds, and he says he has “found that the Trust’s practices described herein may have deprived the beneficiaries of as much as $4.9 million…”
It’s already well-known that the BIAW spent workers’ money from the fund on political campaigns—and the state House is hearing a Senate bill today to correct the problem. But the prof’s testimony implies something else entirely: Even if spending fund money on political campaigns was legal, raising the money through things like misappropriating and commingling funds—was not.
Aaron Ostrom, the director of Fuse, the liberal activist group that’s promoting the lawsuit against the BIAW’s controversial workers’ comp fund, says: “The conventional wisdom in most circles is that the basic setup for how they [the BIAW] divert money from workers comp is actually legal. The problem here is how they are raising money, beyond the basic 20% cut. If you steal it, it doesn’t matter how you spend it—it’s illegal.”
5. If the polling is accurate, Mayor Nickels won’t make it through the primary.
