Editorial: Heck a champion for better discourse, government

By The Herald Editorial Board

Here’s what the position of lieutenant governor for the state of Washington is not: The person holding the office is not — except in limited capacities — the deputy governor, nor a 50th state senator.

Even so, the lieutenant governor has a long list of responsibilities, among them: serving as acting governor whenever the governor leaves the state or if the governor were unable to serve; as president of the Senate, interpreting Senate and parliamentary rules and breaking any ties; serving on several state committees or boards, including those addressing state finance, economic development and international relations, higher education facilities, and the state’s medals of valor and merit; and making appointments to more than 100 state boards and commissions.

Incumbent Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, who was first elected to the position in 2020 after decades of service in the state Legislature and in Congress, says he hears those misconceptions about the office frequently. He holds no executive branch portfolio, and governor and lieutenant governor run for office separately, and can — and have been — from different parties. Nor does Heck have any authority to introduce legislation. And as far as serving as a tie-breaking vote, that’s happened only once during his term, he said.

Yet, the position remains a vital part of state leadership and has been held by long-serving statesmen of both parties, including John Cherberg, Joel Pritchard and Brad Owen.

Heck, a Democrat, is challenged by Republican Dan Matthews, a Mukilteo resident who has previous elected experience on the Shoreline school board and Snohomish County’s charter review panel. Matthews served as as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam and Iraq, flew as a commercial pilot and was a 747 captain instructor and consultant for Boeing. He has previously run for Congress, most recently in 2022, for the state Senate and for mayor of Mukilteo. He has a master’s degree in public administration.

Matthews did not respond to requests for an interview.

While Heck is not a senator, the job of presiding over the Senate is no less important, “trying to set a tone of absolute fairness and hopefully elevate their debate to ensure that we don’t go down that awful rabbit hole of ad hominem attacks and personal demonization with those we disagree.”

Heck has talked previously about the difference in tenor between the state Legislature and Congress, where he served four terms.

“To put it succinctly: D.C. bad, Olympia good,” he told journalists meeting with lawmakers and officials in Olympia in 2023.

That willingness to work past differences in the state Capitol, Heck said, resulted in meaningful achievements, especially in 2023, on issues of housing supply and affordability. Housing must remain a priority at a state and national level, Heck said, because affordable housing is a basic necessity but also influences other issues, including homelessness, retirement security, generational wealth, racial disparities, education and more.

Heck sees work remaining on keeping rents affordable and on streamlining permits for construction, but the ultimate solution must involve all levels of government as well as the private sector.

“We have to figure out a way to to get the private sector more aggressive” in building more housing, he said.

Heck said he is glad to see the issue as a priority for fellow Democrats Bob Ferguson in his run for governor and Kamala Harris in her presidential campaign.

Heck also also is reaching across international borders on issues of international relations and trade, leading trade missions to Ottawa, Canada, Mexico City and the Farnborough airshow in England, and working to pass a bill that established an inter-parliamentary exchange with British Columbia’s assembly.

“We know that as the Vancouver, B.C., economy continues to become bigger and bigger, it’s more intertwined with us, and we need better communication, more collaboration between our legislative chambers to ensure that there aren’t any rough edges at that international border,” he said.

Returning to the housing issue, Heck said some of the conversation with B.C. lawmakers addressed their work on transportation and housing issues, including an emphasis on building more housing on college campuses, so that students weren’t pricing out seniors and other residents from their homes in the community. Heck said lawmakers included money in the budget for a study by the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges regarding student housing.

Along with reaching across aisles and borders, Heck also has worked to instill the same collaborative ethic outside the Legislature in the larger public discourse with his Project for Civic Health, a joint effort with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, the Daniel J. Evans School and the Ruckleshaus Center, intended to promote civil discourse and improve governance and public accountability.

One outgrowth of the project, following a citizens’ summit with about 200 people from across the state, Heck said, was an agreement among the project’s partners to launch a collaborative leadership program to train city council members, school board members and other local officials on how to work across differences toward common goals.

The thought, Heck said, is that by starting with those local officials — who might then move on to the state Legislature and Congress — those skills for civil discourse will be developed and carried with them. Heck praised similar work undertaken locally by Snohomish County Council members Nate Nehring and Jared Mead and their Building Bridges Project.

Heck and the project also convinced the Legislature to establish a joint select committee — “a very rare creature,” Heck joked — on civic health, to ask and address these questions:

“How do you work across differences?” he said. “What’s the value of having more respectful discourse? What’s the value of leaning in to trying to find principal compromises, and what do we need to do to grow our capacity to disagree better when that’s not happening?”

Heck, in his first term, has encouraged and modeled better public discourse for his peers in Olympia and sought to expand those practices throughout the state and its communities. In turn, that can only result in better governance and improved public confidence in the ability of politics to meet needs and solve problems.

If that wasn’t an official duty of the office of lieutenant governor before, it should be now.

Voters should return Heck to those duties.