Tired of being stuck in traffic?
Sign up for our congestion-relief special.
We’ll synchronize traffic lights, let everyone drive in carpool lanes and quickly clear disabled vehicles from roadways.
All this at no cost to you. We’ll just set aside tax money that you’d be paying anyway for general government expenses.
This could be the pitch for Initiative 964, the latest Tim Eyman-sponsored measure. It’s selling transportation relief, and who can be against that?
The problem is in the details, particularly the provision that sets aside 15 percent of revenue from the state sales and use tax on new and used vehicle purchase, approximately $128 million per year.
That money presumably would be used in the first year or two primarily for synchronizing traffic lights. Once we get all the lights synchronized, most of the money would go for the extra patrols to clear disabled vehicles.
The money would come from the state’s general fund, meaning that it may come from education, from the state patrol or from prisons.
If the measure gets to the November ballot, let’s make it clear where the cuts would come.
A proper use of the initiative process
When our forefathers added citizen initiatives to the state constitution, I don’t think they had in mind measures like the congestion-reduction measure that micromanages state government. Rather, they envisioned the kind of measure offered by former Gov. Booth Gardner that would allow physicians to prescribe medicine to terminally ill patients to allow them to end their lives.
If it reaches the ballot, we’re bound to hear emotional arguments as we did in 1970, when we passed an initiative legalizing abortion more than two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly a century ago, we probably had a similar argument over an initiative that prohibited alcohol sales several years before prohibition became national law.
On a conditional gift to the University
Everett lawyer and former Mayor Ed Hansen last month offered to give the University of Washington law school scholarship fund $100,000 on the condition that the university fire its football coach and an addition $100,000 if the university fired the director of athletics.
It made me wonder what kind of conditional gift I might make. I could probably muster $50 or $100 to give to the football scholarship fund if the university dismissed the dean of the law school.
Of course, my offer is ludicrous, but so is Hansen’s. The university should make clear that it would not let big-money donations affect any of its decisions.
Evan Smith is Enterprise Forum editor. Send comments to him at entopinion@heraldnet.com.
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