Here’s the original story from Oct. 9th.
In it the Let’s Move Seattle supporters of the $930 million transportation levy on next month’s ballot made this claim:
This claim is, on its face, rubbish – and @ButterflyForge, aka Laura Dodson, called them out on it.
Now KOMO TV has, too, in a story by Lindsay Cohen, posted Monday and updated today: Controversial tweet leads to questions about $1B ballot measure.
And the Let’s Move Campaign has taken it back – and taken down the claim.
“I want to clarify that tweet was not a scientific poll and by no means were we implying there is no opposition,” said Shefali Ranganathan, deputy director of the Transportation Choices Coalition. “I think what got lost — when you’re looking at a few characters on Twitter — is the context of it, and the context is really that we are reporting on what we heard from folks we’re targeting….
“It wasn’t possible to provide adequate context in a 140 character tweet. And it had become a distraction that was taking away from the substantive issues of the campaign, so we took it down.”
Actually, neither the claim nor the context seem especially complicated – just not true.
Incidentally, The Seattle Times this weekend took another critical look at the levy: Move Seattle levy: Better bus service or a bunch of ‘guesstimates’?
I encourage everyone to read the text of Proposition 1. Of course, actually finding the text is a challenge. It’s nowhere to be found on the Let’s Move Seattle website. And It’s not in the voter guide you got in the mail. You can find it by going to kingcounty.gov, scroll down and under “services” click on “voting and elections.” Then on that page, under “related departments,” click on “elections home page.” From there, find the “November general elections” section and click on “ballot initiatives.” From the next page, scroll all the way down to “Seattle (City of).” Then click on “Proposition 1.” But that only gives you the text of the voter guide. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page and click on “complete text of resolution.” After you’ve drilled all the way down to the actual text, you can see for yourself that the proposition is a more-than-$900 million blank check (written in legalese), with no real plan (that spreadsheet that @Tim links to is hardly “detailed”) and no accountability — just a bunch of aspirational ideas that city functionaries are completely free to ignore if they want (see the bottom of page 8 and the top of page 9 of the text – “the Spending Breakdown is illustrative only and shall not be mandatory.”). And the oversight committee is a joke. It has no power. It just issues reports. (And it’s stacked with council and mayoral appointees.)
I bike regularly and and take public transit every day. But Proposition 1 is a sham, dressed up in a slick ad campaign. And this tweet-gate is just another way the proponents are playing loose with the facts.
Vote No.
Thomas you couldn’t be further from the truth. A detailed spending plan is available.
The backers of Move Seattle won’t promise to spend all this money on anything in particular. It’s a slush fund for the City’s favorite buddies, and that is all it is.
You have a strange definition of “rapid” transit if you think a trip takes 3 hours.
Feel free to advocate for the levy all you want, but the minute you consciously lie in your campaigning, you lose me. Besides, I am hesitant to hand over my hard earned tax dollars to those behind such debacles as the Seawall 30% overage, the SR 99 Tunnel/Bertha (Ed Murray was a prime proponent in state legislature) etc.
And while I fully support rapid transit etc., the complete disregard for those of us who can’t devote 3 hours on the bus in order to drop our kids off at school, go the grocery store, go to work, pick up the kids, drive them to soccer etc. is another big discouragement for many
Reliable transit access is critical to gross affordability (which is the calculation of housing + transportation costs). Move Seattle will greatly increase access to reliable transit via 7 Rapid Ride additions that are heavily focused on lower income parts of Seattle.
This would be funded through property taxes, which are progressive. 2/3rds of the tax would come from commercial properties – which means that Amazon would probably the single biggest contributor. People who live in $3M waterfront properties will pay way more than your average Maple Leaf home owner (most of us would pay $8-$14 a month).
Bottom line, you cannot say you are pro-transit, pro-progress and pro-affordability and be against Prop 1. If we don’t vote to invest in transportation infrastructure, we will not get the transportation infrastructure that Seattle desperately needs.
$12 a month sounds very reasonable to me. Since this blog included a link to the opinion of The Times, it is worth reading The Stranger’s opinion as well:
http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/10/15/23017914/guest-editorial-the-lets-move-seattle-will-modernize-our-citys-transportation-system
MLL: Note, this is not The Stranger’s opinion but a guest editorial. The Stranger does endorse the levy, though, here.
Politics as usually in this country. Try to fool the sheep voters that care more about drama and baseless social media claims than actual substance. A page right out of Sawant’s playbook.
If you can’t provide adequate context in 140 characters, maybe you should use a different medium to properly communicate your ideas.