First there was the story of how some unhappy 43rd District constituents—labor people in particular—are threatening to work against House Speaker Frank Chopp when he runs for reelection next year. Then there was the video of Chopp explaining himself to upset constituents. Now comes the transcript of The Stranger's long interview with Chopp (a man who doesn't usually do long press interviews).

This is Part One, in which the speaker talks up his progressive record, explains the math as he sees it in Olympia, and promises to try to raise taxes in the upcoming legislative session in order to fund necessary state programs. More to come as the week goes on.

ELI SANDERS: Let's start here: The thing that obviously infuriated some labor leaders was the failure to pass and push the worker privacy bill, and I think that you’ve said that was a mistake, or at least I was told by some labor leaders that you’ve said that. And there were some other labor leaders who’ve complained that the budget this year was all cuts, and no increase in taxes.

HOUSE SPEAKER FRANK CHOPP: Right. Well, let’s take the budget first. Because of Initiative 960, we could not—we did not have the votes to repeal that or amend 960. Because it’s an initiative, it’s in law for two years. It can’t be amended by the legislature without a two-thirds vote. I don’t have two thirds. I had 62. Now I’m down to 61. That’s it. So, constitutionally, there was no way of raising revenue other than a few fees. You could raise fees by 50 percent, and we did that, we had a number of fees that we did, including on one that we passed in the House—it didn’t pass in the Senate—the oil barrel fee. We were using that to do clean water projects. So, we did some revenue increases, but, you know, literally—I mean, you need two thirds to pass an amendment to an initiative.

SANDERS: Remind our readers what 960 was.

CHOPP: It was an Eyman initiative. It passed with, uh, I think around 51, 52 percent. We worked against it, but it did pass. As opposed to this time—we just nailed 1033 with a lot of great effort going on there.

So, it basically said that any tax increase whatsoever, you have to have a two-thirds vote of the legislature. And I didn’t have two thirds. I had 62, and now 61. So I think [labor and other critics] should just keep in mind what the state constitution says about what I can do.

And this is an example—let me give you another example of where labor was concerned about the legislature before. Going back, when we were in the tie situation—I don’t know how long you’ve been aware of the legislature—but for three years we were in a tie. And labor was demanding that I pass collective bargaining for state employees. But I literally could not do that in a tie, because I can’t unilaterally change the rules of the House.

The rules of the House were basically both sides had to agree for a bill to go to the floor. As soon as we got the majority, we passed collective bargaining rights for state employees. And then, subsequent to that, we passed massive expansions of collective bargaining rights for home care workers, teaching assistants at the University of Washington. We also passed the same rights for childcare workers. We passed that in the House, the Senate has turned that down twice. So those are very tangible things.

Because part of my experience as a community organizer for the last many many years, is in fact organizing low-income workers to get unionized and to get better wages. For example, home care workers: I started on that effort in 1982 at the Fremont Public Association. I was the first nonprofit to recognize a union to represent home care workers. We didn’t have a vote, I just said “I’m the director, you’re recognizing them.” And our goal there was to raise the wages for those folks, because at the time they were being paid—I think it was like $3.60 an hour. It was really bad. And no health benefits, no sick leave. So one of the things I decided to do when I ran for the legislature for the first time was to correct that, and get them unionized, and to get them a decent wage, and health benefits, and sick leave.

SANDERS: And many of these things you were able to do before the Democrats had the supermajority that they have now. I mean, this is one of the criticisms that you have—OK, sure, some of these accomplishments occurred after the supermajority—but one of the criticisms is that you now have this supermajority, and what are you doing with it? Your point about needing two thirds to increase taxes I understand. But there’s also the criticism from labor about the worker privacy law, for example.

CHOPP: Yeah, but in terms of this issue of before and after the supermajority—before we had the supermajority we passed collective bargaining for state employees. Tens of thousands of workers. Then we worked with the SEIU unions to pass it for homecare workers. That was when we had, I think, 55 Democrats.

Well, now, the next iteration after homecare workers is in fact childcare workers. We just passed that with our supermajority, it just passed with a good margin in the House, it got to the Senate, didn’t pass. And another one that’s related to that, this year—we passed the version that labor proposed and wanted in terms of unemployment insurance benefits. The Senate, though, did not concur.

So there’s been a number of examples of bills—in fact, I think I’ve got a list here, of uh…(rifles through papers). So we had that with the supermajority, we passed collective bargaining for childcare workers, which I think is a very socially progressive thing, and that’s tens of thousands of workers, working very closely with Kim Cook at SEIU 925. And so, in terms of the budget, we’re prepared next year to amend 960 so that can help raise revenue for critical programs.

SANDERS: So are you promising to do that next session, to amend 960 and then raise taxes to help fund the items in the budget that had to be cut this year?

CHOPP: Yeah.

Even this last session I proposed, well we need to have more revenue for some critical education and health care services. I proposed raising taxes this last time. But it would have required a vote of the people. So myself and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown convened a group of a lot of labor leaders, going back to December of a year ago—you know, a year ago—to figure out how best to deal with the budget crisis with raising revenue, and in that case it required a public vote.

Now, the budget got a lot worse, and so this next session there are a number of ideas that we’re looking at to raise revenue to pay for some critical human services, critical education services, etc. So we are very much—in fact, I’ve had many, many meetings with labor unions since the session. I’ve had, uh, gosh, I probably—probably 30 different meetings with labor leaders since session. And in fact, another thing we can show you is that, the labor council gave me their agenda, maybe that’s over there, for next session.

And philosophically I agree with all of it.