Thursday, January 24, 2013

WA state Senator Don Benton, the white courtesy phone is ringing..

If you do a little research, Senators Don Benton and Pam Roach are co-sponsoring a bill in the washington state senate src: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=5093&year=2013 that will affect the ability or change the wording to disallow the use of twenty dollar that municipal governments collects through the state department of licensing to not be used for "ANY THING" other than roads or highways.

Now, if you live in an area like Clark County, this may affect the ability of the constrained 2004 transit district that hovers around the smaller northern cities, the bigger brother the city of Vancouver and the urban clark county from using the revenue to benefit bus or light rail systems that is supposedly going to be built with Columbia River Crossing Project. src: http://www.columbiarivercrossing.org

This might hamper the ability of other already formed and using this same revenue through municipal governments in the state, that may use this money to fund their transit operations.

Read the legislative link, look at line 25 through 31 or so at the underline text to see the substantive change to the RCW RCW 82.80.140.

You can also find this modified language in Senate Bill 5885 being considered in the Senate Transportation committee

 "If the proposal for a high capacity transportation system plan and financing
  plan is rejected by the voters, the proposing transit agency may not
  devote any time or resources to the further development of the high
  capacity transportation system plan and financing plan until the voters
  approve the proposal. "

As it currently reads the change in bill as of January 22, 2012. This bill will be making this change in the same RCW 81.104 that contains a lot of the High Capacity Transit language and other basic transit system state language.

src: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2013-14/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Bills/5085.pdf

You can follow the progress of this piece of legislation and its historical record here: http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=5085&year=2013