The weekend was full of news to catch up on, so Shift grabbed a few morsels you might have missed while cheering on the Seahawks, or Huskies, or Cougars, or even the last weekend of the Mariners until 2017.
The lead item is a review of all the taxes you will get to pay if Sound Transit convinces voters to ignore its past performance, and give the Seattle-centric bureaucrats a record-breaking $54 billion in new taxes (on top of the billions in taxes already in place from the last two Sound Transit votes, which Sound Transit gleefully promises to extend with this year’s vote!).
Also looking for an extension is our “green” governor Jay Inslee, who is hoping voters have enough blind faith to re-elect him, so he can have a few more months (until conveniently after the November election) to come up with a plan to fully fund our public schools, only about 5 years after the Supreme Court told the state to come up with a plan. Other folks who don’t care much about Washington State’s constitutional responsibility for providing adequate school funding are the mega-donors pushing I-1464, the so-called campaign finance initiative. They are pouring millions into out state to, ironically, fight “big money” in politics, and to give liberal politicians our tax dollars for their campaigns.