WA state agency asks taxpayers for $60,000 to “rebrand” itself

By Conner Edwards | Freedom Foundation

This month, the management team at the Puget Sound Partnership – a taxpayer-funded state agency – decided to follow in the footsteps of such famous apparel lines as Nike and American Apparel by establishing its own “brand.”

No other agency has garnered as much public attention – for all the wrong reasons – as the troubled Puget Sound Partnership.

Some of the Partnership’s more publicized expenditures include: $3,600 for lip balm, $12,000 for personalized vest jackets, $700 for “personalized mahogany gift boxes containing sparkling cider for state officials,” and $40,000 to pay off a whistleblower who had been illegally fired by the Partnership’s 36-year-old executive director (who landed the job because his father was a congressman).

Now, the director of this small 40-person state agency is asking state taxpayers to foot the bill for a $60,000 “rebrand”.

This new proposal has provoked quite a few questions in the minds of Washingtonians, the most obvious being: “Why does a state agency need to have its own brand?”

at Freedom Foundation.