City Re: Why the City is Appealing I-87
Erica C. Barnett,
First of all, isn’t it just fab that I have Slog post privileges, so I can upgrade a mere comment on ECB’s post into a full-fledged post. Eat your heart out “Mr. X,” “FNARF,” “Gomez” & “Will in Seattle.”
Anyway, I don’t have a problem w/ Tom Carr’s reasoning. My issue is that Nickels didn’t have the guts to come out against the initiative on his own (and so, piggy backed on Carr’s technical objection) and used that as cover to trash the initiative. Nickels claims I-87 is “throwing money at the wrong problems” and “making matters worse.”
This bugged me because Nickels was all gooey over the 2004 Families & Ed levy…which, by his current standard, threw “money at the wrong problems.”
Moreover, I-87 doesn’t throw money at the wrong problems. It reduces class sizes.
Also, how does creating a revenue stream for smaller classes and all-day kindergarten make the budget matters worse? That’s a weird construction Nickels has got going on.
Again: I think Nickels doesn’t want a property tax on the ballot this fall because he wants to save his own ballot measures: a transportation levy, & maybe a bid to get the green light from voters on spending $4 billion on a tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Having said that, yeah, Carr’s got a point. Nickels, though: Nope. Just naked politics.
Liberals whining in Seattle? Who would have ever thought that possible?