Going back even before the 2016 Legislative session, Shift has let readers know how mismanagement is a feature of the state’s tolling program under Governor Jay Inslee and his chosen Transportation Department leaders. The Seattle Times uses front-page space today to point out that the state’s transportation department is so inefficient that it is “proposing to collect tolls from solo drivers on weekends, extend the hours when two-person carpools are tolled, and boost the current $10 maximum rate to $15 or even $18 for peak trips on I-405.”

This proposal comes for a mismanaged program that even “WSDOT’s latest fiscal report shows (how) express toll lanes lost $1.9 million in third quarter 2022 due to equipment and maintenance cost.” Imagine losing money on toll lanes that are the only option people have sometimes.

As scary as this Washington State Transportation Commission pre-Halloween trick is for normal drivers, imagine that the person who uses I-405 to drive south from Snohomish County “could pile up $54 in tolls on a 50-mile drive from Lynnwood to Puyallup.” You can see why opponents charge that this is “exactly what we expected. This is because the state is losing money” here… Shift, Seattle Times.

Brian Heywood, founder of Let’s Go Washington and a beekeeper, uses this week’s Newsmaker Interview to detail six key initiatives the organization aims to bring to the 2024 Washington State Legislature. Each initiative requires 324,516 valid signatures from registered voters by this December 29, though Let’s Go Washington hopes to secure more than 400,000 signatures for each one to ensure a lawful count. The initiatives cover diverse areas, including easing police pursuit restrictions, repealing the carbon tax to reduce gas prices, allowing residents to opt-out of the Long-Term Care payroll tax, repealing the Capital Gains income tax, prohibiting any income taxes by the state or local governments, and establishing parents as primary stakeholders in a child’s upbringing through a parents’ bill of rights. Read more.

Secrecy is a way of life in the Jay Inslee administration, as Shift has often noted, and after 10-plus years, some in the legacy media have begun taking notice. Such is the case with a piece from The Olympian regarding “current Washington public records and retention laws (which) may not be able to keep up with all the ways lawmakers and others involved with crafting policy can now communicate out of the public’s view.”

For this story, it’s the Microsoft Teams program that provides the secrecy desired by Inslee’s bureaucrats, who prefer not being linked later to advocating for failed policies today. You can read on for how some open government advocates realize the danger in letting the agencies who prefer hiding things to adopt “their own policies for how and if those messages need to be kept” here… Shift, The Olympian.

Evidently Attorney General Bob Ferguson wasn’t raising enough by simply portraying the leading Republican candidate for governor as being Donald Trump, so his latest fundraising missive changes tactics and talks up “my formidable opponent” and leaves the sleazy stuff attacking Dave Reichert for later in the email. You can read on to see how AG Ferguson never provides a reason for why he should be promoted here… Ferguson campaign email.

An alert reader sent Shift the following – and beware, there is some weird stuff going over there in the Spokane city elections, as you can see here… Spokane’s 8^th Man.

Shift will let this piece, one of several on this sad event hosted by the state’s largest public institution, stand on its own… MyNorthwest.

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