I couldn’t believe my eyes.

There, in the Wall Street Journal, was the latest Cato Institute biennial Fiscal Report of the Governors, listing them in order for their success in cutting taxes and spending in their states.

And where does the Honorable Gary Locke stand?

Fifth! He was fifth, behind the governors of Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas and Connecticut. Even the much-praised and written-about John Engler of Michigan was below him, in 13th place.

How could you do that? I asked co-author Stephen Slivinski of the Cato Institute when I called him in Washington, D.C. Gary Locke never saw a tax he didn’t like, I said.

Practically the first words out of his mouth when he became House budget chair as a legislator in 1989 were that we’d need $400 million in new taxes in the next biennium, despite an anticipated surplus of $378 million by July and over $1 billion during 1989-1990.

When it was suggested by the Washington Institute for Policy Studies that the huge surplus showed we were collecting too much and the state sales tax should be dropped from 6.5 cents to 6 cents to give taxpayers a break, Locke’s response was, “That would be fiscal hell!”

If you want to credit somebody for cutting taxes and spending, I said, credit Tim Eyman and Washington voters for Initiative 695 which, though eventually declared unconstitutional, led to the Legislature’s lowering of car tabs to $30.

And ex-Congresswoman Linda Smith, who led the drive for Initiative 601 in 1993, restricting spending to inflation plus population growth. I-601 has kept the lid on although Gov. Locke has proven to be a political Jimmy Valentine in figuring how to crack that safe and use the money that accumulates.

Gary Locke may be one of the stars of the gubernatorial follies as the first Asian-American governor on the mainland, I said, but tax cutter he ain’t.

“True,” said Cato fiscal policy analyst Slivinski. “The only reason he got such a high grade is because of voter initiatives and I-601 specifically limiting the budget. The variables look very good because he’s been forced to keep spending down by I-601, and taxes down by citizen initiative, and having a Republican legislature in opposition has been very beneficial.”

“If a state has a very aggressive legislature in the form of those who want to cut, and a citizenry and populace who want to cut through initiative,” he said, “we can’t help but give the state as a whole a high grade, only because he wasn’t successful in stopping it. We had no choice but to give him that credit.”

The article in the Journal didn’t go into detail about Locke, preferring to expound on better known governors such as Minnesota’s Jesse Ventura (11th on the list) and Florida’s Jeb Bush (8th) but each state got a personal critique in Cato’s report. There, Locke was described as having a philosophy of “governing from the middle, but is a bigger spender than his rhetoric may suggest.”

He has vetoed nearly 200 bills, said Cato, including a school voucher plan and nearly $1 billion in tax cuts. “Locke has been saved from his own fiscal recklessness by I-601 which has succeeded in handcuffing Locke as he attempts to fund many of his more expensive government programs. Since I-601 passed, state government has grown slower on a per capita basis in Washington than in all but a handful of other states. I-601, coupled with a fairly tight-fisted and independent-minded state legislature explain why Locke’s grade on his fiscal report card is as high as it is.”

Unearned though it is by him, Locke better enjoy his high Cato rating while he can. Since, true to form, he’s working every angle to bust the I-601 spending cap, he’ll surely wind up in the cellar of tax and spending cutters next time around, a spot occupied at the moment by two of our neighbors, Oregon and California. Now do you wonder why they call this the Left Coast?

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.).