AlphaQuestion

Hi Governor Inslee. I don't want to live in Los Angeles, but I keep seeing road expansions planned for my tax money. There is a lot of ground-level air pollution in our cities. And burning fossil fuels is dirty and is warming the planet so that some plant and animal species are at risk of extinction. Given all this, what can we do about getting good, fast, clean solutions for transportation?

King County tax payments account for about 42% of state revenue, but state spending in King County is only about 26% of the budget. If looked at as an average of entire west to entire east, the eastern half of the state gets more in state spending than the taxes it pays.

Would you support a tax on employers for each 6-figure employee they have? Normally a lot of rich jobs seems good, but in some places we have so many new high income jobs that you can draw a direct line from those high-earners (who can pay a lot for housing) to the displacement of lower income people and the disappearance of low price housing. I think the government actually has quite a few examples of having created good low-income housing (it is horrible blocks of concrete when privately built), but the government needs a way to pay for it. charge the people who caused the problem.

I think we have starved transit long enough, and then we build roads and developments in such a way to ensure it is inconvenient and slow to take the bus. There are places (sadly too few) who have done way better. If transit is faster, people will take it and then we won't have to pay for highways. Transit gets starved on purpose by those who stand to benefit from construction projects and selling cars. Then, it gets falsely accused of getting subsidized when there are way more subsidies for roads. I was thinking maybe green lights for buses? Esp in tight areas where building roads is hugely disruptive or impossible.