Letter to the Editor: Passage of I-976 Won’t Help Rural Counties

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Tim Eyman’s recently passed car tab initiative I-976 built popular support around the state by implying that Seattle and King County are ripping off the rest of the state by directing tax money from Olympia to projects such as the badly needed light rail and mass transit systems of King County and the rest of the Puget Sound region. 

The strong, widely held emotional belief that taxes from rural counties like Lewis County are supporting massive projects in Seattle and King County is simply not true. In fact, quite the reverse is true. From 2016, the accounting of Olympia’s income and expenditures shows the rest of the state has been mooching off King County and the numbers are pretty much the same year after year. 

In 2014, 43 percent of the total revenues collected by the state government in Olympia came from King County. Only 27 percent of the money spent by the state was spent for or in King county. So in 2016, for every tax dollar King County sent to Olympia, they got back about 62 cents in services and programs. 

In 2016, for most counties in eastern Washington and rural western Washington, the flow of tax revenue was entirely on the plus side for the counties. Stevens County got $2 back for every dollar sent to Olympia. Lewis County got about $1.40 back for every dollar we sent to Olympia. 

The new Toledo High School is projected to cost about $25 million, of which about $18 million will come from the state. Considering that 43 percent of the state’s income originates in King County, that pencils out close to $8 million Seattle and King County will be contributing to the construction of a new high school in Toledo.

Earthquake safety retrofitting for Edison Elementary School in Centralia will cost close to $3 million, most of which the state will pay. King county will pick up 43 percent of the tab for that. 

Eyman’s car tab initiative has set off calls in King County to keep more of the revenues collected there at home to address problems such as transportation and homelessness. This will certainly mean less money available to be distributed to the rest of the state, but I really can’t blame them. 



Grievances fanned into rage largely by inflammatory right wing talk radio, social media and demagogues like Eyman, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump are dividing the state and the country to a breaking point. Cultural warfare in the 1850s led directly to the Civil War in the 1860s. Americans need to understand that if we keep pulling on this thread, like anywhere else in the world or like in our own past, bitter cultural wars can and do unravel into bloodbaths. 

The claim that the only “real” Americans are those who live in a red county or state or share whatever values that implies is the same nauseating garbage as saying a “real” American can be determined by the color of a person’s skin, their ancestral homeland or their religion or even lack of one. 

 

Marty Ansley

Cinebar