On March 20, Sound Transit will officially inaugurate service at its new Mountlake Terrace highway station at 236th Street Southwest in Snohomish County. The new station, which sits in the Interstate 5 median, is one of the last capital projects planned as part of Sound Move – the regional transit system approved by voters in November 1996. It includes several bus bays, platforms for riders with weather shielding, and glass walls to reduce noise pollution. It also features a covered pedestrian bridge, built to connect the station to the third floor of the Mountlake Terrace Transit Center.
About a month ago, the 2011 regular session of the Legislature convened in Olympia. As this session is taking place in an odd-year, the principal item of business will be to come up with a budget for the next biennium.
At nearly every town hall, legislative action meeting, or budget question-and-answer session that I’ve been to in the last few months, someone has inevitably brought up the subject of tax loopholes, wanting to know why Gov. Chris Gregoire and legislative leaders aren’t talking about raising revenue by repealing outdated, unnecessary exemptions that no longer serve the public interest (or never did).
Defying the conventional wisdom that they can’t accomplish anything significant during the last few weeks of an even-numbered year, lawmakers in our nation’s capital recently concluded a remarkable period of post-election activity, which culminated with the approval of several important legislative priorities that had previously been stalled.
Throughout these last few weeks of autumn, a debate has been raging over taxes at both the state and federal level.
State voters have rejected proposals to raise taxes to protect public services, and approved proposals to defund services.
Every year, during the final weeks before January rolls around again, retailers and automakers go to great lengths to persuade us to buy as much stuff as our credit cards will possibly allow.
Demonstrating their frustration with the slow pace of the economic recovery, voters across Washington State and America unwittingly chose legislative gridlock on Tuesday by opting to punish the party currently in power and rewarding the party that caused the mess, guaranteeing both an ideological and a partisan showdown over the future direction of the country.
The final hours of the 2010 midterms are upon us. As field teams rev up their get-out-the-vote efforts for their candidates, operatives working for both sides have taken the air war in Washington State to new lows, particularly in the Senate contest, which pits Patty Murray against Dino Rossi.
This autumn, Washington voters are facing what seems like a record number of initiatives. Five of these measures are almost exclusively funded by corporations and would damage our state’s quality of life. Here’s a guide to each and why you should vote no.
For many places in the United States, Election Day 2010 will begin and end on Nov. 2, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in the 11th month of the year.
Readers who have paid any attention to cable news channels or political journals lately have probably noticed that the Republican Party is already declaring victory in the 2010 midterms, cajoling the media to report that they’ve seemingly won before a single vote has been cast. The reality is that this is a very volatile and unpredictable election year. If anything is certain, it’s that nothing is certain.
If there’s an anti-incumbent, electoral revolt going on in the United States this year, voters in the Evergreen State evidently aren’t interested in playing a part in it.
As Aug. 17 draws closer, election officials have ramped up efforts to remind us that it’s once again time to be mindful of our civic duty to vote.
In a way, however, they’re almost doing us a disservice by advertising this election as a primary, because we don’t have a true primary. What we really have is a two-part general election, with Tuesday, Aug. 17 being the first stage.
If pundits are to be believed, the hottest contest for elected office in our state this year is our U.S. Senate race, now that Dino Rossi has decided to challenge Patty Murray.
But there’s another battle that promises to be just as fierce: the looming showdown between Republican Dave Reichert and Democrat Suzan DelBene, the expected winners of the primary in the Eighth Congressional District, which includes Redmond.
More than a decade after Tim Eyman qualified his first anti-public services initiative to the ballot, it appears that voters are finally going to get the chance to vote for tax reform instead of tax cuts.
A coalition of progressive public interest groups, led by William Gates Sr., is pushing ahead with an initiative that would create an income tax on high-earners. The initiative is built around two closely related and important ideas: Making our tax system fairer for middle and low income families while simultaneously strengthening our common wealth.
One of the things that has long annoyed me about political coverage in the traditional media is the careless, unsophisticated way that journalists – and many pundits who appear as guests on news shows – classify people according to their political views.
Forty years ago, when the first Earth Day was organized to draw attention to the serious environmental problems created by decades of thoughtless development and industrialization, few Americans realized the extent to which we had deforested our wild places, strip mined our mountains, and carelessly polluted our air and water.
After a year of fierce debate and wrangling, Congress has finally done something that many of the people who cover politics for a living in New York and Washington, D.C. have been telling the country had little chance of happening: it sent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act to President Obama’s desk to be signed into law.
The legislation, which ultimately passed without a single Republican vote, is designed to gradually provide coverage to millions of uninsured Americans and better protection for those who already have insurance.
For much of our state’s recent political history, colorful and exciting top-of-the-ticket races have been a staple of the electoral landscape. Consider the Slade Gorton/Maria Cantwell battle of 2000, the epic Christine Gregoire/Dino Rossi slugfests in 2004 and 2008, George Nethercutt’s challenge to Patty Murray in 2004, or Mike McGavick’s attempt to unseat Maria Cantwell in 2006.
One of the most popular and oft-repeated cliches in American history, which comes to us from Benjamin Franklin, humorously posits that “in the world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”
This short phrase, which is both simple and concrete, has spawned many variations over time, but all of them contain the memorable words “death and taxes.”
Proving that last summer’s opening of Central Link was merely the beginning of a new era, Sound Transit has extended light rail into SeaTac just in time for the holidays.
The completion of Airport Link is by far one of the best Christmas presents our region has ever received. It’s now possible to get to and from Puget Sound’s largest transportation hub quickly, no matter how jammed Highway 518 and Interstate 5 might be.
