John Carlson Is A Weenie

The Seattle Times gave John Carlson, KVI conservative talk show host and failed gubernatorial candidate in 2000, a guest column in today's paper.

While the paper regularly prints a guest columnist on various sides of issues, what I thought was most laughable about this one was the footnote:

John Carlson is afternoon host on KVI radio in Seattle and has led three successful initiative campaigns in the past. He is a supporter of, but does not have a formal role in, Initiative 912.

Excuse me? John Carlson is no mere supporter of this initiative. He supports the initiative on his show, giving valuable free air time to it worth thousands of dollars.

In fact, last month a Thurston County Superior Court ordered that KVI Radio report the value of their talk-show hosts' comments promoting Initiative 912, including those made by John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur.

I-912 campaign manager, Brett Bader, complied with the ruling with an estimate that the in-kind help was worth $20,000 to the campaign — $10,000 apiece for the two hosts in May alone.

A $10,000 per month on air gift from a talk radio show host is a pretty penny.

Others have covered this story in more detail, so if you haven't read about it, I recommend you read David Goldstein's take at HorsesAss.org.

But I'd like to address a few of Carlson's points in his column. He writes:

People aren't ignorant about transportation. In fact, they understand it probably better than any other issue. Why? Because they travel every day. So does everyone they know. They see what their taxes are buying. They talk about it with family, friends, neighbors and co-workers on a regular basis.

So, people understand all the ins and outs of the recently passed transportation bill (passed with bipartisan support mind you), including all the projects that need funding, what money is available, when it needs to be available, what money needs to be raised through additional taxes, and how the decision was made to levy the tax in the various was the legislators came up with. They understand all this simply because they drive on roads and have friends that do so as well. That's quite impressive.

I wonder, does the person that drives from Redmond to Seattle understand these things better than a person that only commutes with Seattle city limits? After all the former drives more miles in a day, and covers more territory when doing so.

Sure, people are familiar with the need for transportation projects, but few ever understand how much these projects cost unless the projects are of the highly reported big ticket kind, and even fewer understand the engineering, environmental, economical and political complexities of transportation projects. So to suggest as much simply because, gosh darn it, we all drive on roads, is a ridiculous argument.

The oft-repeated claim that the public is demanding improvements it doesn't want to pay for is simply not true.

That's pretty hard to believe. When was the last time an initiative to raise taxes for transportation passed? When was the last time an initiative against taxes for transportation failed? When it comes to transportation, and gosh darn it we all know so much about the issue, every solution is a wider road at a low cost, regardless of how little that does to address the problem of too many cars on the road, or how much it costs or disrupts property owners who find their land bulldozered over to make room for a new road.

What people want is one thing: congestion relief.

Tell that to all the people in communities all over the state that don't have congestion problems, but need money to pay for safety improvement projects. Tell it to all the people who have experienced serious damage to their vehicles or personal injury while driving on roads in severe disrepair.

There are some very significant congestion relief related projects that the gas tax will help pay for. An upgrade for the SR-520 corridor is one of those. The project, which includes replacement of the 520 bridge over Lake Washington, includes significant changes to increase the number of lanes over the lake and through the corridor. At an open house on the project, held by the WSDOT, I asked project officials what would happen to the project should the proposed gas tax money not be available to it, and the answer was unequivocal: the project wouldn't happen. This is a very large project that if it were to start as projected would take many years to complete. If the project cannot be funded, and there are few alternatives, if any, that could make up for the loss of the money the gas tax would bring in, we may be heading for a crisis as the life expectancy of the floating bridge expires.

I can tell to something: such a scenario would make me and many others very angry indeed.

The rest of Carlson's opinion piece just blathers on, and like all the supporters of this misconceived initiative, he offers no solutions, makes no suggestions as to how the transportation bill can be modified to address the congestion relief gaps that it supposedly has, and provides no workable alternatives to raising the money needed to pay for all the projects out there.

No, John Carlson is not just a big supporter of the "Something for Nothing" agenda, he's a big fat weenie for using his radio station as a platform to push it, and not having the honesty to see that for what it is - blatant free air time for the anti-tax crowd who want to cripple this state's transportation bill, kill hundreds of transportation projects that address both safety and congestion concerns, and mortgage our future when everything will cost more and the problems to be solved will be far greater. (nwphtt60)