Democracy for Vancouver

Larry Snyder was one of a handful of local residents who attended Monday’s port meeting. The former teacher said he isn’t opposed to taxes and asked the public for more money plenty of times. But the schools didn’t get additional funding without a 60 percent yes vote.

But Snyder said the port’s actions put a “fire in his belly” because “you people can implement the tax with the slam of the gavel.”

Port commissioners said they were sensitive to the fact that the approximately 300,000 residents within the port district would pay more, and that there wasn’t more time for public input before Monday’s meeting.

“The timing sucks, frankly,” Commissioner Brian Wolfe said.

Read on…
Sucks all the way to the bank.
I used to work in that area for about a decade. It has always been an ugly, industrial wasteland, even with that pretty strip of brick, asphalt and streetlights that is the Mill Plain Extension project winding through it. Lots of old houses with elderly and low-income families are also there. I’m all for cleaning up and reclaiming an ugly, blighted area but I’ll bet the tax-hike will affect area residents the most.
But it’s all in the name of big busines… er, I mean progress, right?
Big business don’t need no steenking supermajority….
…They ARE the supermajority.

Stillwell at NPI has more.