No Loss for Words

Voters in the Puget Sound area are being asked to support another Transportation Funding package this year that will increase sales tax rates by about .5% for fifteen years.  It will raise $17 billion to pay for a bunch of projects in King County, a couple in Pierce County and a couple in Snohomish County.

Sound Transit Board members are wildly in favor of this measure and lead us to believe that it will solve our regional transportation problems.

I’m a pretty radical guy so the information I read is probably not credible, but it is my understanding that the best case scenario for light rail is that it will carry about 5% of the predicted commute load in the areas it serves.

I think about light rail system as a public works boondoggle that will produce a product but not one the majority of us really care about.  It will provide employment for many workers in the construction trades for many years.  It will trigger significant investment in land areas around the stations.

If you are one of those people who works along the service corridor of the train, you might see some value in the system, but it only magnifies the problems already existing with transit systems; the system doesn’t offer service from where workers live to where workers work.  In addition, with an expensive rail system, there is no second guessing or re-evaluating where the better route might be like we can with a bus system.

Former State Transportation Secretary Doug McDonald has been traveling with Tim Eyman this fall promoting the “no vote” on Initiative 985.  I have listened to their patter on a number of radio and television broadcasts.  Over the years I have disagreed with McDonald on a number of issues, particularly when he was the State Transportation Secretary.

After listening to him talk about the issues with Eyman, I started to come around to McDonalds way of thinking a little.  In the course of investigating him, I discovered a lengthy piece he wrote this summer outlining why we should “vote no” on the Sound Transit issue.  The three part series he wrote can be found on Crosscut.com.

For lay people who generally have only common sense to guide us, it helps to get credible information from generally reliable sources to give us confidence to make critical decisions like this one.  Doug McDonald makes a compelling case for us to vote “NO” in November.

For me, I prefer to focus my attention on making Snohomish County less reliant on King County or anyone else.  If we develop our own tax base and transportation plan that positions us to work toward our border with King County as a partner rather than a poor step child, we can negotiate from strength rather than weakness.  Our current situation puts us at a distinct disadvantage.

In the early 1990’s, when I was working with our peer cities and the county as the Snohomish representative to Snohomish County Tomorrow, we regularly had presentations from Puget Sound Regional Council staff outlining the regional plans and how our County fit into their plan.

Those meetings left me convinced that if we throw in with their plan, we will forever play a third class role in the region.  At that time the plan was called Vision 2020.  Now it is called Vision 2040.  The map shows Seattle as the center of the universe and everything else emanating from the center.  It called for all the best things to happen in King County and if there were any crumbs, the little people could fight over them.

I cannot name too many people that would choose for our county to look like King County.  Our vision for our county needs to be fleshed out by people making the investment to live and work in Snohomish County, not in King County.  What happens in Snohomish County can be a product of our efforts to inspire investment in a transportation plan that works for us.

Approving a Transportation plan that sucks hundreds of millions of dollars out of our county doesn’t make sense.  We need to have our County Council members go out into their districts for community meetings to gather public input on a Transportation plan that serves the needs of local communities, not a King in some far off land.

The people in Stanwood, Arlington, Granite Falls, Lake Stevens, Snohomish, Monroe, Sultan and Gold Bar might have a different perspective on this issue than Edmonds or Mountlake Terrace.

There are 17 billion reasons to “Vote NO” on the Sound Transit issue.  Let our voices be heard.

Vote NO on Initiative 985 too; Doug McDonald says it’s the thing to do.

With news of the ongoing crash in the stock market, thoughts about other issues seem trivial by comparison.  It is like trying to plan for after Armageddon.  Despite the economic news, the sun is still shining outside and people are still going about their lives.  All over the world, people face life’s uncertainties every day.  I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that anyone else has problems as bad as mine, but that’s just my opinion.

With a presidential election a couple weeks out, there is some likelihood that the pendulum will swing back to the left again.  Obama looks like he has the election in the bag.  There are a lot of people fed up with the job Bush has done with the country and I am one of them.  In spite of the fact that Bush dropped the ball, I still believe that McCain would lead us better than Obama.  I’ve been wrong before.

We spent a lot of years with Democratic control of the Congress and the White House.  If you thought they did a good job then, this might not be too bad.  I voted for the first time in 1968 when Richard Nixon won the Presidency.  The congress had been under the continuous control of the Democrats since 1952 and up until the revolt of 1994 they had their way.  Then the Republicans broke the strangle-hold when they won the majority and held it for fourteen years.

At the time of the hand off to the R’s after the 1994 elections, I remember asking rhetorically whether the R’s had learned anything about being better stewards of the government from being in the minority for so long.  It didn’t take too long to see that their first order of business was “payback”.  Such a disappointment!

In looking back over the past forty years, I think the government worked best when each party had control of either the Presidency or the Congress.  Each party holds the other in check.  Things go south when the same party has control over everything.  The Republicans have been as irresponsible as the Democrats ever were.  We’ll see whether the D’s have learned any lessons.

I remember listening to Political Commentator, Carl Jeffers on his radio show one Sunday in 2006 prior to the mid-term elections.  He is a left winger and both the Congress and the President were Republican at the time.  He was saying the same thing.  He was obviously stumping for Democrats when he said that he didn’t think the government worked too well when one party was in control of both the Congress and the Presidency and voters should elect Democrats to take back the majority in the House of Representatives to balance the power.  I thought at the time old Carl might be saying something he might want to retract later.

Now after two years of a slim majority in the Senate and a more substantial majority in the House, the D’s are on the verge of a sweep.  What does old Carl say now?  Well, just this morning he was enthusiastically stumping for Democrats and Obama.  I guess he really meant that he didn’t like Republicans to have control of the Congress and the Presidency.

Partisanship is running our country off the road and into the ditch.  I am not suggesting that one party is better or worse than the other.  I think both parties are more concerned about staying in power than solving our problems.

After this election, I don’t expect much to change for a while.  As much as Obama would like to raise our taxes, he might have his hands full dealing with the recession.

I don’t blame the voters for the backlash; a bad experience tends to turn folks to a different direction.  I only hope that the different direction we are turning to will deliver the positive difference America is hoping for.