Sen. Bob Hasegawa (D-Seattle) collected an extra $22,680 from taxpayers during the special session, claiming $120 a day in per diem while he was campaigning in Seattle for mayor. Hasegawa and 13 other legislators claimed more than $20,000 in expenses during the special session.

$1 million is being spent to build electric-vehicle charging stations on Interstates 5, 90, 82, 182 and Highway 395. In total, the state is building 15 stations, being funded by annual registration fees on electric cars as well as private spending.

Amazon looking for headquarters outside of Seattle should come as no surprise to anyone. Senator Guy Palumbo (D-Bothell) said, “This has got to be a major wake up call for the Socialist echo chamber in Seattle, making a single company that’s responsible for the biggest increase in your tax revenue over the last decade or so a scapegoat for all of Seattle’s societal woes – it just creates a hostile business climate.”

“Congestion would actually be better if WSDOT stopped purposefully making the congestion worse by attempting to socially engineer people to ditch their cars,” Jason Rantz wrote earlier today. He breaks down how WSDOT manipulates the traffic and transportation systems to create traffic through various methods – one of which includes slowing traffic down with a variable speed limit system that costs $42 million and doesn’t really work. (Read more here)

Seattle Public Utilities wants to raise utility rates again, proposing a six-year plan to the Seattle City Council that would raise rates an average of 5.5% a year over the next six years.

Bothell has a new $13 million, 11-lane downtown boulevard that just opened last week and features a new kind of traffic control. The inside five lanes of the boulevard are for through traffic and the three outside lanes on each side are for slow traffic. City capital division manager said it is replacing the highway to, “knit together the old historic part of downtown with the new downtown.”

While setting records for poor air quality and heatwaves, Spokane is also setting a record for the longest dry spell – going 76 days, as of today, without rain.

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