This year is a year to use Lent to give up habits you shouldn't have acquired in the first place. So, I'm going to give up gossiping about the far of '08 presidential race for the next six weeks, plus using a web browser at work. In Episcopal traditions, you get to break your fast on Sundays, but that's it. So, it'll be all local, policy, House, and Senate blogging for the coming month and a half.
So far, so good. 44 days to go.
Thursday's P-I included a chart covering the various funding sources for proposed Renton Arena for the Sonics. To recap, new Sonics owner Clay Bennett went to the state leg' asking for $300M in public financing, plus another $100M from the City of Renton.
The good news is, the House Ways & Means Committee funds the Arena entirely by extending existing taxes put in place to help pay for other pro-sport sites, not by raising new taxes. What's more, hotel tax and car rental tax are a classic tax on other people's money and a tax on some of the "winners" from the new arena. The [restaurant] food and beverage tax doesn't fall directly on the winners.
The biggest political obstacle is the sales tax credit, dedicating a portion of state sales tax revenue to Arena construction. This represents money that might otherwise go to another region in the state, or go to other priorities like education and health care. In the context of a state's entire budget, it's not a huge amount of money—$155 million over 9 years works out to $17.2 million per year, in a state that spends almost $6 billion per year on K-12 education (pdf). It's probably enough to build and staff one or two schools. Every little bit helps, though, so I wouldn't scoff at Speaker Chopp's desire not to spend money on a stadium.
The other kicker is Bennett's suggestion of $100 million from the City of Renton, which has an annual budget of approximately $170 million with capital expenditures near $25 million. Spreading the financing over the 20 year life of the stadium, the Sonics are asking for a 3% increase in city expenses, and a 20% increase in capital improvements. This would imply a serious tax increase in the city, unless Renton decides to raise the cost of its permits & fees to help pay for the arena. To get an additional $5 million/year out of the sales tax or property tax would mean an overall increase of around 12.5%—if Renton's rates were 100 mills and 4%, they could raise them to 112 mills and 4.5%, respectively. I'm not sure how the homeowners, landlords, and residents of Renton feel about that, pro or con.
Erica's dust bath went a little too far last night:
They're back.
New Sonics owner Clay Bennett headed to the State Legislature, pitching a $500 million Arena (P-I, Times). "Let's build it right. Let's build it big. Let's build it flexible," was part of his pitch for this grandiose use of public dollars. We'll go into funding specifics later, but let's lay out the broad princples once again:
The state is in a strong negotiating position, and has little reason to accept Bennett's current offer. I still think $275 million, with ownership putting up 60% of the money, sounds like a fair deal.
Melissa McEwan (aka Shakespeare's Sister) has also resigned from JRE '08. A look at some of the mail Amanda Marcotte published gives you a flavor of why. And no, "she was asking for it" or "it comes with the territory" doesn't cut it here. Melissa has been in The Game for a while now; she's probably already gotten more than her share of nastygrams. Something particularly awful must have shown up in her inbox.
In the same way that immigrant bashing led to an increase in hate group activity, one wonders if the faux-third-wave feminism and joking-on-the-straight mild chauvinism of pop culture has led to an increase in much more unsavory attitudes towards women. Better data is needed to answer the question.
Happy Valentine's Day.
I know, I know, the world is just dying to know what I think of local transportation issues.
Seriously, this is important stuff. Being stuck in traffic is just wasted time, which has tremendous direct economic costs, in addition to reducing the effective fuel effeciency of our driving habits.
Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was a state-of-the-art road when completed in 1953, suffered severe damage in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake and must be replaced. It must be removed or replaced; the question is how. Mayor Greg Nickels, together with a coalition of downtown businesses, land owners, and art/public space enthusiasts, have pushed for a three-lanes-on-each-side tunnel to replace its capacity, at a cost of roughly $4.2 billion. The state government, which is footing a large portion of the bill, would prefer a $2.8 billion replacement. Current committed funds stand at $2.4 billion. This means that to pay for the replacement plan, we must come up with $400 million, or roughly $41/year per adult Seattle resident for the next 20 years, while the full tunnel would have cost $187 per taxpayer per year. The Mayor's "tunnel lite" counterproposal, a $3.4 billion four-lane tunel plus surface street improvements, would have amounted to $100 a year per person.
There are strong arguments for the tunnel, which would give the city an opportunity to develop public space downtown—something you can always use more of, especially if the city wants to attract parents—but, you can only raise taxes and fees on the public so high. Viaduct funding may crowd out the ability to raise revenue for other priorities, most notably, schools, which are the number one amenity that Mom and Dad look for. For comparison's sake, if Seattle were to take the difference between the replacement proposal and the "tunnel heavy" proposal and devote all that revenue to schools, it would raise around $67 millon—enough for a 13.7% increase in the school district's operating budget.
This being Seattle, the public has been asked to vote on the subject, in a very bizarre way. Not that I know much about transportation policy. Question one is, "should we replace the viaduct with a new viaduct, yes/no", while question two is, "should we replace the viaduct with a new tunnel, yes/no". What happens if both proposals come up yes? Or both propsals come up no? It doesn't matter, the vote is just an advisory vote and doesn't have any legal or budgetary impact. Awesome.
But wait! It gets better! The State DOT has published a report saying that the "tunnel lite" proposal, which is on the ballot, is basically unacceptable. Double Awesome. But, the ballots are printed, so we'll probably get to vote on the tunnel anyway. TRIPLE Awesome.
At this point, I think I am rooting for both proposals to go down in flames, with the hope that strong no votes for both will send the state & city a back to the drawing board, and return to the public with a new proposal when they have their ducks in a row. Either that, or for Robert Moses to rise from his grave and tell us how it is.
Amanda Marcotte resigns from JRE '08, citing the difficulty of doing her job when "every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign".
This is why people hate politics—instead of being a contest of ideas, people like Bill Donohue turn it into a game of "Gotcha!" involving whose low-level staffers said what and just how far can we twist it out of context. Amanda's writing is certainly caustic, but it's almost entirely satirical as well (and certainly no less caustic than lots of stuff you can dig up from the right-of-center blogosphere).
There's no spin to be had in either direction. Marcotte wasn't fired, but team Edwards didn't go to the mattresses to keep her on the staff. Of course, staffers leaving because they know they're causing the pol too much trouble is a time-honored tradition. Melissa McEwan (aka Shakespeare's Sister) will still be with JRE, and netroots outreach can always continue in other forms.
Um, Mr. Gilliard? No one shot Bobby Kennedy because he was for civil rights; Sirhan Sirhan, a halfway-deranged Palestinian-American, shot RFK, supposedly for his support of Israel (The Evan Thomas biography suggests Sirhan saw video of Kennedy at a synagogue; Wiki suggests that the evidence is not so clear-cut)
Elsewhere, yes, let's stop conflating pre-emptive war (which is what Israel did when they saw the tanks lining up on their border) with preventative war (which is what George W. Bush was selling when he got us to invade Iraq on the off chance that they might some day ). The first is a natural response to a real threat; the second is just wetting the bed over what might happen many years down the road.
From a KING-5 wrap-up of last week's "life without the viaduct" pitch to the Downtown Seattle Association:
Ground was broken ceremonially today for downtown's biggest tower project called Escala. The $350 million project will be centered at Fourth and Virginia. The view condos are starting at a half million dollars and the developer, people with money, are buying. ["and the developer says, people with money are buying"—ed.?]"Baby boomers who are downsized," said Joe Strobele, Escala spokesman. "They're doing their duty, put there kids through school, they had good careers, good business. They want to buy their time."
I have nothing against fiftyish workaholics trying to make the most of their newfound free time by living in the city. But while an influx of new, childless residents is a short-term boost to the city's tax base, it shows a neglect of family-oriented housing in the recent construction boom. Seattle is already has the second-fewest children of any major US city at 15.6% of the population, behind San Francisco (14.5%). Studio and one-bedroom high-rises—in an area of town with very few schools—are unlikely to meet the needs of potential residents with school age children. Filling the Escala and other downtown towers will likely hasten the decline in the percentage of young Seattlites.
High density condos are great, but higher density housing where you can raise a family is what the city needs most. At some point, Seattle will have to consider investing the windfall from condo development into quality-of-life improvements—school construction near downtown or mass transit, subsidizing full-service grocery stores, driving away open-air drug dealing, and whatever park space you can scrounge up—that will help the city compete with the suburbs.
Backstory: The Edwards campaign hires Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. Cranky rightwingers dig up a few out of their hundreds of blog posts that are, shall we say, colorful. Bill "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see it in the public square with nativity scenes." Donohue, president of the ultra-right wing Catholic League (which doesn't represent All Catholics, by any stretch of the imagination), professes outrage and demans scalps. Nedra Pickler, a frequent target for campaigns looking to have a reporter transcribe their press releases, dutifully parrots Donohue's outrage at the use of foul language and "bigotry" by said bloggers.
This is all completely absurd. In the Internet era, everyone will have a track record a mile long, as Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (R-MA) is learning the hard way. We need to get the the point where politics is more than the art of taking the few worst words you can find in your opponent's history (or in this case, your opponent's staffer who has little to no impact on policy) and blowing them completely out of proportion. Let's let CNN cover this snafu today and move on.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 04:50 07 February 2007
