Offer a real fix with an honest cost

Published 11:39 am Friday, November 16, 2007

You can breathe a sigh of relief that elections are over — but they’re not. Over the next year you will be subjected to so many hysterical assertions about important issues like transportation and global warming that you, like most others, will become numb.

If you want to guarantee an issue won’t be solved, make it political. Consider transportation. We have had so many propositions, initiatives and tax packages to “solve the problem” that many of us have forgotten what the original problem was. We have a traffic logjam and all Olympia and the special interest groups can do is offer us “comprehensive packages.” They claim the proposals will solve our woes and satisfy those civic-minded people who despise the fact that I have to drive my car to work every day. These solutions never seem to isolate a single problem, kind of like killing a fly with a blunderbuss.

I wonder when they will offer a package to fix actual traffic bottlenecks without lumping in some sort of mass transit dream. I bet if you put a package to the voters that just fixed I-5 between Everett and Seattle, with a honest cost and means to pay for it, it would pass.

Nationally, take global warming. You would think that it’s a done deal and we are to blame, so we should give up everything, scrap our cars, and hop on the mass transit train. Have you yet seen a logical, economically feasible plan from our elected officials yet? No, not one, because every alternative has some environmental group poised to pounce. My positions are not extreme — just fix the problems. Yet the only thing I will hear in response is more political outcry and personal attacks. And that is why these issues won’t be solved by our government.

Don Thompson