Crime is the number one issue. A few weeks ago, friends of mine were sitting on their boat at the Swantown marina and could see the parking lot. They witnessed..in broad daylight, a pair of thieves breaking into a car. They called the Oly police and got...crickets. No response. The pair then broke into a second car and again, my friends called the police with no response. When the pair then broke into a pickup truck and began to try to steal it, the police FINALLY responded. I believe they arrested the two and probably released them that day.
When you talk to the vendors at the farmer's market, they all have stories of thieves vandalizing their booths. Some places in town there are more needles than weeds. There used to be a medical outreach clinic right across the street from the Bus Transit Center...and Providence shut it down because so many of their staff (most of whom were volunteers,) were being threatened, accosted or robbed. There used to be a neato bike shop, kitty corner from the same Transit station, and the man finally shut down the business because of so much theft. People would literally steal the bikes from in front of the shop.
Yes, I hear it...homelessness is not a crime. But the activities of those homeless people are often criminal in nature and that IS a crime.
The other problem is that Olympia simply cannot understand that people want to shop downtown, but hate having to pay for parking. Parking meters are increasingly expensive and universally loathed. Small businesses are being throttled to death. Oly City Council seems to think that the small business man or woman has the deep pockets of Amazon.
Then consider that the OCC really tried to make it so that developers could get away with not putting in any parking spaces for people living in their expensive new high rises. REALLY? Social engineering doesn't work, Olympia.
So much of OLy's emphasis seems to be focused on the homeless, but it's coming at the expense of those of us who really would like to have Olympia the nice, cool place it used to be. More policing, and less taxation on small business is the best way to turn things around.
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