Ms. Dolan, the link you posted doesn’t work. You’re also missing the plot. Whether or not it’s a regressive tax is not the issue. Why do we need more government to fund our fire departments? Why don’t you include how much you would personally pay for the FBC? Do you think your “many good friends who own lovely homes on the waterfront” appreciate your point of view? Have you considered that rent prices will have increase to compensate for the FBC? We don’t need additional taxes to pay for our emergency services. We need your successors to spend the tax revenue they have responsibly. Considering that you’re boasting about establishing the new capital gains tax, I doubt you understand how this affects real families.
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Well said, Larry. Our fire departments need more funding, not more bureaucracy.
There is plenty of money being spent on services that don’t benefit the majority of people of Tumwater and Olympia. Chief among them is Intercity Transit. All day and all night, nearly empty buses roam around town for the low price of $74.5M (collected from sales taxes last year). Their total resources available stood around $235M at the beginning of the year. I posted a link in the previous article if anyone is interested in seeing their budget.
We need safe, clean and efficient public transportation. Not free rides for drug addicts. The grocery store is a 15 minute drive from my house. Using the bus routes it takes over an hour and a half. We aren’t getting the service we paid for!
Fund our fire departments by ditching the buses! If you want a big-city living with public transit, then you need big-city revenue to pay for it. Olympia is the wrong town.
We are not big enough and our tax sales tax revenue is further blunted by a city council that puts the needs of the homeless before the contributing businesses downtown. Our town has so much potential and it is being squandered by poor management. The RFA proposal is more evidence of the same.
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