[King County] More on the Trucks at Seatac

[elfs]

Apparently, the locals have been raising holy hades over the trucks at the airport thing I earlier commented on. Omaha attended a meeting recently in her guise as a Democrat to find out that the trucks are both overweight and uncovered, and the highway patrol office is using between twelve and sixteen troopers per day to monitor the trucks. The troopers are writing tickets constantly.

The port authority has written this off as "business as usual," and both it and the construction companies are writing off the tickets as part of the price to pay for getting the runway done on time. They can do this because they're absolutely flush with taxpayer cash from property taxes, which is being funnelled to, um, state coffers by way of the state patrol.

Twelve to sixteen public peace and safety officers per day are spending their time recycling public funds in a fashion that could be covered by four port inspectors, and in a far more wasteful fashion.

Comments

[omahas.livejournal.com]

I spoke to one of our two state reps in the area, Dave Upthegrove (a very ethical representative of the people, I might add) and got some of the skinny on it. He tried to get a bill passed that would make the port authority responsible for the bill (seeing as how they have a large sum of money basically sitting around right now from property taxes from what I have been hearing) but it never got out of the transportation committee. I'm sure you can figure out why. *cough* business interests *cough*. Anyway, he's trying to get some money into the current transportation bill to at least help fund the added police going out there, since it's not in the local or county police budget for this.

I'm going to do some more research on it talk to a few more people (since I have access to some interesting folks around here right now) and will report back on it. The end result, I'm going to see if I can get something done about this.