Washington State's In-plant Threatened

Here's a statement to make every in-plant manager cringe. To defend a bill he introduced in the Washington State Senate that would eliminate the state's Department of Printing, Senator Rodney Tom reasoned: "Everybody does desktop printing these days. It's not like 30 years ago when you had a steno pool and printers, but we're still stuck in that age."

Yes, you read that right. Senator Tom was insinuating that state employees could save gobs of money by using their trusty desktop printers instead of the state's in-plant. (After all, that toner is free, right?)

As reported in The Olympian, Tom introduced Senate Bill 6867 with the intention of resizing the footprint of government by eliminating the 100-employee department, which he called "antiquated" (if you consider its new Kodak NexPress 3000 "antiquated"). He proposed his bill as the House was preparing to vote on a different bill that would move the Department of Printing under the umbrella of the Department of Information Services.

The House recently approved its bill, voting largely along party lines to preserve the Department of Printing. Democratic Rep. Sam Hunt even came to the defense of the in-plant, telling The Olympian that it already farms out $10 million a year in print work to the private sector.

"So this is not something the print shop does to take away jobs from the private sector. It's a very good cooperative process, and I think we ought to maintain that," Hunt said. "It does also add a competitive feature. Without the print shop we would not have the cost comparison and ability to have these options in our print shop."

He didn't mention that the Washington State Department of Printing just earned a Merit Award from the National Association for Printing Leadership in its Management Plus 2009 Awards program.

The bill to merge the Department of Printing with the Department of Information Services now goes to the Senate. Though that bill may gain some amendments there that could further restrict the state's in-plant, Tom's original bill to eliminate the shop is now dead.

Read The Olympian story here.