"We found out what we needed to know about Governor Ferguson"

I'm a relatively hands-on guy, for better or for worse, and when it comes to a budget, I think that's my approach. Hi, I'm Representative Suzanne Schmidt, and I'm back in my district, the 4th Legislative District, which is Liberty Lake, Spokane Valley, up into Elk, Washington, and Greenbluff. And since I've been back, I've heard nothing but complaints and people just absolutely outraged over the tax package. Now, there was a time between the time that I left session and before Governor Ferguson signed off on the whole tax package, all of them, all the tax bills, there was a time people were waiting to see, like, hey, was he really going to work with us, and did he really have some common sense and some fiscal responsibility? But he signed them all, so we found out what we needed to know about Governor Ferguson. Living in Spokane Valley, we're 10 miles away from the Idaho border, so a lot of the businesses that I represent that are in my district are, again, 10 miles away from the Idaho border, and they do a lot of work in Idaho and Washington. So with all of the B&O tax, the gas tax, the diesel tax, just on and on, on and on taxes, and then also the expansion of the paid family medical leave, UI for striking workers, all of these things, businesses are saying, I'm not going to stay in Washington. I can go to Idaho. If I invest more into my business, it's not going to be here in Washington. And they're outraged. And that's the businesses. Then let's go to the individual people. Before I left for Olympia, people were telling me, please don't raise our property tax. We are just tapped out. We can't afford higher property taxes. These are elderly people on fixed incomes, younger people on fixed incomes that really can't afford to pay more for property taxes. But guess what? We raised property tax. We had a property tax bill that we stopped, and then a couple days later, the Democrats basically rewrote the bill and presented it under school education or K-12 education. And it was a property tax increase. The Republican caucus fought as hard as we could on the floor. We ran all kinds of amendments. We were up all night trying to stop these bills. And the Democrats just wanted to push them forward. They just kept moving forward. So we also hoped that maybe Ferguson would do some line item vetoes. Maybe he would do some vetoes, that he would stop some of this. He didn't. He signed off on everything. We're moving forward. We're going to tax every person in every business out of this state. And I'm hearing every day from people in my district that are telling me they're looking at moving to Idaho, moving their business to Idaho, or if they're bigger businesses and they have different operations in different states, they're looking at investing more money in those states so they can get out of here. And so that is going to affect the cost of everything. I'm Representative Suzanne Schmidt, and I am fighting for you.