Christine Gregoire

The site, established in 1943 to provide support for the Manhattan Project, operated from World War II through the Cold War.

Decades of production of plutonium resulted in millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste.

Christine Gregoire (née O'Grady; born March 24, 1947) is an American politician who served as the 22nd governor of Washington from 2005 to 2013.

Multiple private suits stemming from a 1950s study in the British Medical Journal linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease.

She had come under fire during the primary for her membership in Kappa Delta because of its nonwhite membership policy in the late 1960s.

After graduating from Auburn Senior High School, she attended the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts in speech and sociology.

At UW, she became a member of the Sigma Iota chapter of the Kappa Delta sorority.

She then attended law school at Gonzaga University in Spokane, receiving her Juris Doctor in 1977.

Gregoire went to work as an assistant attorney general in the office of State Attorney General Slade Gorton, a Republican.

As an assistant attorney general, Gregoire concentrated on child-abuse cases, coordinating with social workers to get children removed from abusive family situations and placed with relatives or foster homes, and was later appointed as the first female Deputy Attorney General.

In 1988, at the end of his first term as governor of Washington, Booth Gardner appointed Gregoire director of the Washington Department of Ecology.

During her tenure, Gregoire worked with Gardner to reach an agreement with the federal government to clean up nuclear waste at the Hanford nuclear site.

In 1989, the Washington State Department of Ecology along with the EPA and the US Department of Energy (DOE) entered into the Tri-Party Agreement, which sets targets, or milestones, for cleanup.

Following the contentious US v Washington case related to Native American fishing rights, commonly known as the “Boldt Decision,” Gardner undertook to build more lasting, friendly relationships with Washington's Native American tribes.

The Accord served to bring parties to the table to negotiate their shared interests.

Gregoire played a principal role in helping reach agreements about the natural resource distribution between the tribes and the state.

Gregoire served four years as director before running for attorney general in 1992.

During her tenure, she oversaw the creation of the Pacific States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force.

Following an oil spill off the coast of Washington and British Columbia involving the barge Nestucca, Gregoire coordinated with the Canadian government to form a task force to handle concerns West Coast citizens had surrounding oil transportation.

While at the Department of Ecology, Gregoire worked with Gardner and representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy to coordinate efforts on the Hanford Site cleanup.

Known by many names, including the Hanford Project, Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works, and Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nuclear facility along the Columbia River in Benton County produced plutonium.

Gregoire was elected attorney general in 1992 by 11 percentage points over her opponent, Norm Maleng, an attorney who served and was reelected seven times as King County prosecutor.

She was Washington's first and only female attorney general.

Gregoire was reelected in 1996 and 2000, both times over Richard Pope, by about 25 and 18 percentage points respectively.

As attorney general, Gregoire worked on children's issues, helped reform the juvenile system, passed a new ethics law for state government, strengthened rights for victims of identity theft, and worked to find alternatives to litigation in resolving legal disputes.

During Gregoire's second term as attorney general, the tobacco industry was under fire for alleged fraudulent marketing, negligent advertising, and violation of several state consumer protection statutes.

Attorneys General on June 20, 1997, led by Gregoire negotiated a settlement that required tobacco companies to pay more than $206 billion over 25 years in reimbursements to the states for tax dollars spent to treat Medicaid patients for smoking-related illnesses.

The companies also agreed to pay $50 million to national attorneys general for enforcement.

These payments funded children's health services and programs and a $25 billion trust for health-related issues.

For her leading role in the litigation, Gregoire won the state of Washington a $4.5 billion share of the settlement over the next 25 years with the payments continuing in perpetuity.

Gregoire and Governor Gary Locke asked the legislature to reserve portions of the settlement for restitution to the state and to establish a special account to finance a long-term tobacco prevention and control program.

The account would be used to pay for anti-tobacco advertising and education, accessible cessation programs, and other activities.

In March 1999, Gregoire announced that Washington would receive at least an additional $394.9 million in settlement payments from the major tobacco companies.

Other portions of the agreement included enforcement of laws against tobacco sales to children, broad-based smoking prevention strategies, smoking cessation programs, full disclosure of tobacco's health effects, and preservation of an individual's right to sue the tobacco companies.

A member of the Democratic Party, she defeated Republican candidate Dino Rossi in 2004, and again in 2008.

She is the second female governor of Washington.

Gregoire defeated Ron Sims and four other minor candidates in the Democratic primary election for the governorship on September 14, 2004.

Gregoire chaired the National Governors Association for the 2010–2011 term.

She also served on the Governors' Council of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Gregoire was born in Adrian, Michigan but was raised in Auburn, Washington, by her mother, Sybil Grace Jacobs (née Palmer), who worked as a short-order cook.