Cascadia Report

Category: Politics

  • What’s at stake in airport-for-land deal

    The Port of Seattle and King County announced plans Tuesday to give the county ownership of a 47-mile suburban train line and the port control of Seattle’s secondary airport, which is now county-owned. The stakeholders need to tread carefully.

    Consolidating management of the region’s airports makes sense. Currently no fewer than four governments control the major airports closest to Seattle, leading to competition that doesn’t benefit taxpayers or travelers. Look at King County’s attempt last year to lure Southwest Airlines from port-owned Sea-Tac, a move that would have added to road traffic and hindered the airport’s regional role.

    Unfortunately the latest plans may waste the valuable rail corridor, a 100-foot-wide swath that could easily accommodate a multi-use path alongside a commuter rail operation for much of its length. King County Executive Ron Sims seems focused on ripping up the rails to build a bike path, which would be a personal legacy, according to an earlier press release, but wouldn’t significantly improve the region’s mobility. Instead, retooling the train corridor could dovetail with Sound Transit plans for light rail and buses to serve job centers on the Eastside, and with additional commuter trains south of Seattle. Parcels that don’t fit could be sold to help pay development costs.

    Those details seemed far away during the announcement Tuesday. When asked what the deal would cost, according to the Seattle P-I, Sims said: “A lot. Wow, I don’t think we’ve ever…I don’t even know how to start counting. Hundreds of millions of dollars.”

    There are still many pieces that need to come together for the deal, which also involves other property and rail lines. But the focus needs to be on improving the mobility of the region and on getting long-term value for taxpayers, not the vanity of another bike path.

  • Endorsements split on major Washington races

    Washington’s major newspapers have weighed in with endorsements for the Nov. 7 election, with several citing the country’s runaway spending and Iraq quagmire as top issues. The question is how much sway will they really have.

    The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Everett Herald, Vancouver Columbian and Tri-City Herald all backed Maria Cantwell for reelection to the U.S. Senate. The News Tribune cites her mastery of policy and unease at retail politics, saying she “bears a striking resemblance to the man she unseated: Slade Gorton.”

    The Seattle Times endorsed Republican challenger Mike McGavick, citing his cost-cutting experience at Safeco, where he turned around the company’s finances by slashing the workforce, raising insurance rates and shedding businesses. The Bellingham Herald and Yakima Herald-Republic also backed McGavick, saying his pledge to cut spending gave him a slight edge over Cantwell. Each said they wished one of the candidates would have advocated a change of course in Iraq.

    In Washington’s other nationally watched race, the Seattle Times and the News Tribune backed Republican Dave Reichert for reelection to Congress from the 8th district. They cited challenger Darcy Burner’s inexperience and party-line attacks on the Bush Administration — instead of on Reichert — for the decision. Only the P-I backed Burner, saying that she made a strong case to unseat Reichert for his votes on the minimum wage, tax cuts and torture.

  • Latino voters gaining force

    Latinos are a small but growing force in electoral politics across Cascadia. The bet is on when they will make a difference.

    In Oregon, they make up about 10 percent of the population, but only about 4 percent of eligible voters and even fewer actual voters, according to a front-page story in The Oregonian. Latino voters are likely to be significant in 10-15 years. But this year, the Republican candidate for governor is betting that anti-immigrant policies will win him more support from working-class and conservatives than it will cost longer term.

  • Vancouver’s model for downtown living

    Vancouver’s downtown elementary school is so popular after two years that it’s running out of space.

    The crunch suggests the city is doing something that Seattle should emulate, according to this article examining the merits of living downtown for families. It includes the obvious point that Seattle can’t open schools downtown until there’s enough demand. Far more important is streamlining regulations to encourage more units of all kinds, which would eventually lead to more stores and other amenities. Middle-class residents and families will follow.

  • Why Washington property measure isn’t ‘only fair’

    Campaign signs are popping up across Washington saying “I-933, It’s Only Fair.” But that’s not the impression a spokesman for the measure left at a recent Seattle forum.

    Initiative backer Steve Hammond, a former King County Council member, confirmed the issue is about fighting government. Speaking at an election forum last week in the Eastlake neighborhood, he said the measure would prevent the sort of oppression he felt a few years ago when the county passed restrictions on rural development.

    washington sprawlApparently rural landowners need a blunt instrument like a statewide initiative because they don’t have the numbers to change the state’s leadership.

    “Why not just vote for new representation? Because you need representation that represents you,” he said, noting that during the council’s vote he was the only of 13 council members who was personally affected by the land-use rules. “If they vote (on issues) outside urban growth boundaries, they need to live outside urban areas.”

    According to the voter’s guide, Initiative 933 would require government to compensate property owners when “regulation damages the use or value of private property.” Hammond agreed that the government wouldn’t have the funds to compensate landowners. Instead it “would be forced to act differently,” he said. Such a rule would turn back the clock on community planning, essentially giving rural property owners the right to dictate development of the state’s open land.

    Indeed Hammond explained that small landowners currently bear most of the cost of the state’s land-use rules. He told Eastlake residents who worry about gutted development laws that their urban neighborhood would be mostly unaffected. In other words, voters should let rural property owners do whatever they want with the land, regardless of the consequences.

    It’s true that policy needs to be fair, consistent and not hurt the little guy. That’s a good reason to reopen debate in the legislature about land-use laws — but not to support I-933.

  • Picks from Sunday’s papers

    1. A Seattle Times poll found that 51 percent of Seattleites want to rebuild the waterfront viaduct freeway. One-quarter each wanted a tunnel, a surface-street option or hadn’t decided. Unfortunately the poll simply confirms the obvious because cost was apparently the main factor presented to the 400 people who were questioned. An efficient surface-street and transit package would win support if people were told of the construction hassles and massive size of a proposed new aerial viaduct.

    2. The strength of British Columbia’s economic boom may depend on what the Canadian central bank does with interest rates. The Bank of Canada is expected to leave rates unchanged at 4.25 percent on Tuesday but could indicate plans to cut them in the future. Central Canada’s economy is on the ropes, thanks partly to the slumping auto industry. Could a sign of lower rates to help the rest of the country overheat B.C. and Alberta?

    3. Polls suggest that Republicans may take the governorship in Oregon, a trend bolstered by a pair of profiles in The Oregonian. Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who won in 2002 by 3 percentage points, comes off as a technocrat who doesn’t have much to show for his four years in office. Republican Ron Saxton, a Portland school board leader, says a governor needs to take on teachers’ unions in order to improve education. Saxton has raised more money to fund his TV ad campaign and could benefit from voter frustration.

    4. Seattle-area rental costs are soaring — a subject Cascadia Report has experienced first-hand. Some neighborhoods have a vacancy rate of less than 1 percent, according to a real estate survey. Rents rose 7 percent in the last year and are expected to climb another 4 percent this year. Blame job growth, a slowing market for new homes and condo conversions for the trend.

  • Maybe Seattle’s policy isn’t so liberal after all

    Seattle’s political leaders rage against President Bush and the support liberal events. But their way of governing, which effectively delivers spoils to their buddies and corporations, isn’t liberalism.

    So says Ted Van Dyk in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He decries the big-government land grabs by local transit agencies, massive subsidies to companies like Boeing and perennial blackmail in order to raise taxes.

    “No city, even our Emerald City, can govern itself this way without in time becoming New Orleans or Jersey City,” he writes. “Grandiose public works projects go hand in hand with payoffs and public corruption.”

    He’s mostly right. The area needs activists who are willing to question the status quo way of doing business. For example, someone needs to hold the Port of Seattle accountable for financial misses, mismanagement and waning competitiveness.

    But Van Dyk misses a key point. Cascadia and the Seattle area need to invest in better infrastructure in order to cope with growth, and that means steppingon some toes. The region also needs a tax structure that encourages companies to expand here and makes it easier for start-ups to fluourish. The key is picking competent representatives who will do this in the most efficient way.

  • In memoriam of Helen Chenoweth

    A memorial service was held this week for Helen Chenoweth, one of the demagogue-politicians who helped turn inland Cascadia into fertile ground for radical Republicans.

    After years of feeding her neighbors’ fears of government and outsiders, she was swept into Congress during the 1994 Republican tidal wave. She was famous for arguing that salmon couldn’t be endangered when you could buy it canned at Albertson’s. She saw the United Nations a threat to the American way of life and accused the Interior Department of harassing ranchers with “black helicopters.”

    She left Congress after three terms and died last week in a car crash in Nevada, reportedly with an infant on her lap and without wearing a seatbelt. Now her over-the-top positions are fading amid eulogies that admiringly note she always “said what was on her mind.” No matter the revisionist history when it comes to her views — her lasting legacy is Republican dominance in a state that was once solidly Democratic.

  • Ex-governors try to stop land-use initiative

    Washington Governor Chris Gregoire and six of her Democratic and Republican predecessors came out against I-933, the so-called property rights initiative on next month’s ballot.

    Their logic wasn’t new: the measure, which requires government to compensate landowners for restricting development, would cost too much and tie up land-use planning in the courts.

    Yet bipartisan opposition may not halt the measure. Four living and former Oregon governors opposed a similar measure in that state in 2004 but it passed with 61 percent of the vote. In 2002, a Washington roads and transit package, referendum 51, was soundly rejected despite bipartisan support from politicians, labor and business.

    Proponents of I-933, of course, couched the latest measure as a way for citizens to restrain an unruly government. “It’s political, and government officials are opposed to an initiative that will hold government officials and politicians accountable,” Dan Wood, a spokesman for the initiative and the Washington Farm Bureau, which backs the measure, is quoted as saying.

  • Picks from Sunday’s papers

    1. Cascadia’s booming beer and wine industry is learning to throw its weight around. The Oregonian reports that an Oregon booze association has showered $1.2 million on lawmakers. The result, the paper says, is cozy distribution rules and a state government that repeatedly shied away from using beer and wine taxes to cover alcohol treatment and schools during a budget crunch.

    2. Roads are crumbling or washing away in national forests across the region. The money to maintain the roads dried up along with the logging industry in the early 1990s, according to a Seattle Times report. Now there’s an estimated $1.1 billion backlog on repairs to national forest roads in Washington and Oregon. The decay hinders tourism, housing and fish runs. The story doesn’t address the millions of dollars in the government still spends to build roads elsewhere as a logging-industry subsidy.

    3. Tillamook is the new Hood River, according to a group that’s trying to turn the depressed Oregon coast community into the next outdoor-sports hotspot. The group is using grants and business partnerships to transform the strapped community, which has always made its livelihood from farming, logging and fishing.

    4. You can lock them up but then someone has to pay. Washington’s Department of Corrections wants another $175 million to cope with the leglislature’s relentless crackdown on lawbreakers. The money would pay for more workers who could operate a prison for another 2,000 inmates.

    5. One of the backers of the building boom in Vancouver and Whistler is aiming for a wider legacy. The developer started a charity called Builders Without Borders to build housing in Sri Lanka, Turkey and elsewhere.