Archive for December, 2008

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December 20, 2008

Mill Town or Ghost Town?

by Steve Dana

Historically small towns were established around commercial trade and service centers. Their purpose was to provide goods and services to a population nearby. They grew as the commercial activity or industry developed. In Snohomish County, many of our oldest cities sprouted at river crossings near agricultural activities. The market, mill or processing plant was in town. Around the “core employment business” were retail commercial shopkeepers and a work force for both as residences. That was a town. Without all three components, what do we have? Read the history of our county.

One important thing to remember about them was that as their industry flourished or failed, the city did the same. Today, ghost towns exist as a testament to long lost industry. We need to remember that without a business base, a town has little substance and is in jeopardy of blowing away. Even today with exploding population in small towns, a well supported business community is critical to community health. Failure to keep that concept high on the priority list will be disaster as we plan for the future.

If you listen to regional planners, they would have us believe that we can have thriving suburban cities without a base of private sector family wage employers. History doesn’t support that concept.

Public sector employers like school systems are often one of the largest employers in a community but they don’t produce sales tax or property tax revenue that pays for local government.

Sadly, many cities are drying up and blowing away because the mill (substitute your major private sector employer) has closed.

The percentage of the workers that have jobs producing a marketable product is getting smaller and smaller. Service sector and Public sector employers are increasing by percentage. Historically, a country is only as strong as its ability to produce durable goods. As we buy more and more consumer goods from foreign sources we undermine the foundation of our society.

Imagine how a community reacts when a major employer leaves town. The loss of employment plunges the town into recession. Retail businesses fold because they aren’t selling product to the former employees of the plant. Sales taxes and property tax revenues shrink and government services go away. This scenario has played out thousands of times in our country. All this because of the loss of family wage employers.

We need to make sure our leaders don’t lose sight of the importance of private sector family wage employers. Thriving businesses are the foundation of a successful community.

Posted in Political commentary, Snohomish County Political Commentary | Leave a Comment »

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December 19, 2008

PROgressive CONservative PROCON That’s Me

by Steve Dana

Sometimes, I am conflicted regarding the role of elected government officials.

Should government be a few “elitist smart guys” that save us from ourselves by pitching an narrow agenda that will be painful to complete, achieving goals us common folks didn’t know we should have from the start?

The partisans that call themselves “Progressives” are the worst. They are so stuck on themselves. They are the ones that think they are saving us by being elected. They are the ones that think we wouldn’t understand complex issues. They are the ones that like to use big words to demonstrate their superior intellect. They are the ones that think they are the smartest person in the room.

The partisans that call themselves “Conservatives” are not far behind.

What is a Conservative anyway? Is a person with a Pro-Life abortion stance a conservative if they also support labor unions or the ‘green’ agenda? In the two party system, it creates a real dilemma.

Do we want an elitist government from either party to tell us we have been bad and now we have to take nasty medicine to make us better? Or, do we want government to be common folks who recognize we have to adapt to changing conditions and alter our course, factoring into the process both positive and negative impacts then balancing the change against the cost?

Are we at the point where we have to adopt the extremist point of view or perish?

I am convinced that the vast majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle. We all want smart guys working on our behalf, but we don’t want them talking down to us.

The labels we put on parties confuse me to the point where I don’t know where I fit anymore. (That would suggest that I did at one time.)

The problem I see with most elected officials is that they fail to do their homework. The scope of the problem is huge so they rely on staff to do the in depth work on an issue and never develop an understanding that comes from slogging through the details. Bureaucrats and Lobbyist capitalize on this weakness the most.

The other major problem in a partisan system is the fact that party leadership has so much power. With the power to control what issues come to a vote, what language is in a bill, the trade-offs, the deals and anything else you can imagine they often don’t represent interests of constituents. Partisans have their own elitist club and most of us are not in it.

The two-party system does not offer alternatives for Pro-Choice Capitalists like me. David Brooks calls us Progressive Conservatives. Isn’t that ironic?

Posted in Partisan Politics, Political commentary | 1 Comment »

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December 17, 2008

Less is More!

by Steve Dana

Presidential Chief of Staff designate, Rahm Emanuel recently responded to comments about the new president coming in during tough economic times. He said that difficult times present opportunities for change we might not get otherwise. Is that making lemonade out of lemons? It’s a great suggestion public officials should consider at every level of government.

Now is a good time to rethink how we commit to spend public funds. Tight budgets force us to slash our workforce. As we adjust to the loss of public employees, the prudent thing would be to evaluate the work being done by all our public employees. If we look at both productivity and processes we can determine whether we can permanently adjust to a smaller government.

Salaries with benefits for employees is very large component in the growth of government. Even if we have a “no growth” stable workforce, the cost of government goes up based upon the ‘cost of living’ index plus whatever extra is built into negotiated labor contracts. If the number of workers goes up, the cost increases compound. Our goal should be to keep the actual number of employees low and make sure we can afford down-the-line impacts of labor contracts we approve today. If revenue growth is not keeping pace with the cost of indexed commitments, we are falling further behind.

Hiring new public employees should only happen when we are absolutely sure there is adequate sustainable revenue to pay for them. Hiring and laying off employees is poor usage of public resources and unfair to employees and their families.

How often have you been to any government office where you could see employees in their work environment and you wondered what work they were hired to do? Sometimes you see staff just wandering around. I don’t want to characterize all government workers as slackers, but we have set low productivity expectations for many of them so it takes more of them to get a job done.

Competitive wages and benefits should produce high quality productivity. There have been occasions where private sector contractors were allowed to bid on government work and government managers had to bid to keep the work. If government managers operated like a business and were forced to produce a competitive product, we might get more efficient government for our tax dollar.

Elected officials are responsible for fairly managing the resources of government, balancing the needs of the taxpayers with the needs of public employees. If either one gets out of whack, the operation breaks down.

If all we do during this down-turn is wait for the economy to turn and get back to business as usual without adopting any meaningful change we will have lost a great opportunity. Let’s see what happens with our local favorites and decide whether they should stay or go.

Posted in Partisan Politics, Political commentary, Snohomish County Council, Snohomish County Political Commentary, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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December 10, 2008

“Heart Attack on State Route 9” News at Eleven

by Steve Dana

Snohomish County is a fair sized county when compared to others in the state of Washington, but when you realize that almost all of the development and population exist in the twenty miles that border the water it becomes very small.  The Cascade Mountains are beautiful to look at, but they present an impenetrable barrier to expansion.  How we accommodate growth in the coming years will be seriously impaired by our geography.

 

For all intents and purposes Snohomish County is a strip of land forty miles from north to south and twenty miles (give or take) from west to east.

 

The reason I mention these great facts relates to transportation planning.  Currently I-5 serves as our only significant north/south traffic carrying corridor.  As long as all the population lives and works in the western five miles of the abbreviated county, everything is okay.  As the population expansion pushes development east to the foothills it becomes essential that we provide much better east/west feeder roads and an additional north/south corridor to make sure we have a functional network of roads that does not force everyone to go to I-5 first to get anywhere else in the region.

 

US Highway 2 transects our county and heads east from Everett to the mountains via Snohomish, Monroe, Sultan, Gold Bar and Index.  It is the only significant east/west road in the county.

 

Washington State Route 9 is the existing north/south road that is most likely to be the alternative to Interstate 5.  SR-9 is currently being upgraded, but it will not even address existing deficiencies when funded projects are completed.  We need to begin to look at SR-9 like a freeway rather than a country road.

 

With funding for projects scarce, it is imperative that the investments we do make are not wasted by failing to consider the bigger picture by looking at future needs at least in the engineering phase.  Upgrades to SR-9 should include plans for “grade separated” intersections so that traffic does not have to stop at every crossing.  Traffic signals allow access for crossing or merging traffic but bring through traffic to a halt.

 

The reason the interstate works as effectively as it does is because traffic doesn’t ever stop intentionally.  It keeps moving like blood in our human arteries and veins; remembering that a blockage in our bodies causes heart attack or stroke.  The analogy works for traffic just the same.

 

Transportation planners need to look at SR-9 and engineer for the future rather than the past.  The mountains limit our choices for an alternative path so efforts should be focused on making commitments to the right projects that are not obsolete before they are completed.

 

GRADE SEPARATED INTERSTECTIONS have continuous traffic flow on the mainline and overpasses with different features to accommodate intersections.

 

If we don’t incorporate this thinking into our planning, we will be squandering millions and millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars.

 

The other component to this analysis is the incorporation of a rail line into the right of way improvements to accommodate a north/south train service.  The scope of the rail service is debatable, but if we are serious about maximizing right of way efficiency a rail system should be in the mix somewhere.

 

The Eastside rail initiative is beginning to talk about using the existing line from King County to the Snohomish River at Harvey Field for rail traffic of some kind.  We should be looking at extending the line right up SR-9 as far as Arlington for now, but on up through Skagit and Whatcom Counties as well.  Having a second rail corridor to Canada might even be a good idea.

 

Remember the phrase of the day for Washington State DOT and Snohomish County transportation planners should be GRADE SEPARATED INTERSECTIONS for SR-9.

 

The bonus idea is rail service all the way to Canada along SR-9.

 

The cost of implementing these ideas will only go up as time passes so we better get with the program.

Posted in Political commentary, Snohomish, Snohomish County Political Commentary | 1 Comment »

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