For many Washington voters, support for public transit has never been the issue. Over the last three decades, voters repeatedly approved major Sound Transit ballot measures because they believed investing in transit would reduce congestion, connect communities, and help the region grow responsibly. In 1996, 2008, and again in 2016, voters signed off on tens...
Seattle investor Charles Fitzgerald believes his hometown is on the verge of becoming a modern Cleveland, the city symbolic of the post-industrial Rust Belt era during the 1970s and 1980s. A similar urban decay could happen in the Puget Sound region if a new income tax is passed by the Washington Legislature. That bill (SB...
Among the regular stream of meaningless partisan statements issued by Governor Bob Ferguson’s communications team was one of last week which has received almost no attention from the local press. It is significant because it reveals the lack of accountability by our political leaders, and it helps explain why the Seattle/King County region and our...
Today, the Trump Administration began to dismantle the ineffective and costly Housing First homelessness policies, which have caused the country’s homeless problem to become even worse. The Obama-era policy resulted in a record-breaking 770,000 people to suffer on our streets during the last year of the Biden Administration. In Washington state, homelessness rose 78% since...
The number of homeless individuals in King County has risen again. The suffering grows in encampments, vacant buildings, and in urban green spaces, despite billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on building large housing bureaucracies at multiple levels of government. While those in charge of our region’s failed homeless strategy have become very wealthy, more...
On May 10, Sound Transit went all out in its promotion for the opening of its new light rail train stations in Redmond. The many expensive public relations firms which Sound Transit retains, lined up politicians and media celebrities to speak, music acts to entertain, food trucks to feed the crowd, activities to entertain...
After the 18-member Sound Transit Board of Directors unanimously approved former King County Executive Dow Constantine at the end of March to become its new CEO (a move which will cost taxpayers more than $6 million), many residents have asked the questions, who is on the board and who are they accountable to? Sound...