State legislators are looking for ways to pare down a budget deficit projected to be $4.6 billion in 2011–13, and ease recessionary burdens on local governments, too.
SB5360 and HB1478 would allow cities and counties to place public notices on their Web sites instead of publishing them in their local newspapers. The idea: to save local governments the cost of publishing those notices in print.
But those savings would be minimal, particularly compared to the resulting disintegration of the public’s access to information about what their government is doing.
Go to nearly any state Department of Licensing office in Puget Sound and you’ll see the crowds.
Kent’s office is no different: if you need a driving exam, brace yourself for a long wait. It’s a poignant symbol of just how slow and painful Big Government can be. Take your number, sit in a plastic chair and wait for someone to summon you. You can spend the better part of a morning just sitting.
I was dumbfounded with the results of a reader survey on our Web site last week.
We asked, “Have you ever successfully completed a diet?”
Astoundingly (at least to me) 85 percent of respondents said they had, in fact, done so.
For myself, I suppose the same could be said: I have successfully lost a total of 400 pounds.
Now that 2010 is in the rear-view mirror and 2011 is one exit away, I can shift my attention to the time-honored tradition of making my New Years’ resolutions.
Dear Santa: Since I can wager your e-mail inbox is full already, I decided to go old school and write this on my Word document and print it, put a stamp on it and schlep to the post office where I stand in line for 20 minutes watching Gramps Muldoon, take five more minutes explaining to me the benefits of postal insurance.
Earlier this month, Pamala Heydt was telling me about her dream for Christmas.
The veteran - who can best be described as “effervescent” - wanted to collect a major batch of Christmas cards to take on a goodwill call to injured veterans receiving care at our local V.A. hospital.
“It’s Christmas time and it’s my way of giving back to soldiers what they’ve given to me,” said Heydt.
If you took a speech or rhetoric class in school you might remember the styles associated with persuasion, from the Greek ethos (appeal to character and credibility), logos (appeal to logic and reasoning), and pathos (an appeal to emotion).
A Kent Fire Department tradition that has been helping families for years could now use some help itself.
The clock is slowly ticking toward Christmas, and the Kent Toys for Joy Program is slowly plodding along.
Donations to this family-friendly program are down – and considerably.
(U.S. Sen. Patty Murray on Dec. 13 released the following statement about the Senate vote to extend tax cuts. Murray, who voted twice this month for tax packages to extend middle-class tax cuts, today voted to move forward with a compromise package that extends current tax rates for two years. The package extends important tax cuts for middle class Washington state families, includes an extension of our state sales tax deduction and extends unemployment insurance for 13 months for out of work Washington state workers.)
If Jayne Johnson gets her wish, she’ll be watching the Seattle New Year’s fireworks from a very special vantage point.
It won’t just be the room she’s in.
It will be because Jayne, 16, will have survived the most intense medical procedure of her life.
I met Pamala Heydt for the first time this week. It was a cold, rainy Tuesday morning at Kent Station. Considering what she had just been through, Heydt should have been angry. She should have been steamed.
The disabled veteran, who lost 40 percent of her vision during basic training in the Army and who now is unable to drive, had been waiting for a bus that morning, with her friend Will Zastawnik and boyfriend David Conlin.
She wanted to take the bus from the top of Kent Hill, to come talk to me about her hopes of collecting several thousand Christmas cards, to give to veterans in two area VA hospitals.
The bus apparently passed them by.
Rest in peace, Dave Niehaus. The Mariners voice for 33 years died of a heart attack the evening of Nov. 10. He was 75 years young. He was an idol of mine for all of those years; I always enjoyed listening to the play-by-play guys since I was old enough to work my AM radio. When I was a kid I did a pretty mean impression of Howard Cosell, and at my first Trailblazer game my first autograph was not for a Blazer, but for Blazer play-by-play man Bill Schonely.
Here we are, parked at the start of a holiday season.
That said, you can basically put the entire human species into one of two camps:
• Those who started shopping for presents the day after last Christmas; and
• Those who will start shopping for presents by Christmas Eve.
I had a real-life experience similar to that recently described in the Kent Reporter, where a woman was pulled over for drunk driving, but was in fact sober. A couple of years ago, I was pulled over on Interstate 5 by a Washington State Patrol trooper, for what he suspected was drinking and driving.
(These are speaking notes from a press conference that King County Sheriff Sue Rahr delivered Nov. 18, to lay out the budget impacts to her department, and how her office is responding to those cuts.)
Do you ever have one of those “Wow, I can’t believe it used to be like that” moments? I was watching the 1980s movie “Black Widow” a few weeks ago. Debra Winger plays a reporter, and her boss is in the office massaging her shoulders at her desk, while asking her when she will start dating him. I was thinking to myself that there were about six different workplace violations in that one scene.
When I started as a police officer, we had dispatchers in a certain room, and whenever you would walk in, the cigarette smoke in the air would gather and hang about three feet down the ceiling. Twenty minutes spent just talking in that room was the equivalent of smoking five cigarettes vicariously.
Here’s one more example for you. When I was a high school resource officer, I vividly remember the students, both male and female, whose lives were impacted by bullying over who they were: unpopular, looked different, didn’t have the money to get certain clothes. It may seem a little quaint to think that anything could be that serious in high school, but it was. High-school students sometimes take things very seriously. A break up with a boyfriend, or bullying, or what we would consider temporary problems can result in permanent outcomes, like suicide. We have all heard a lot about teen-suicide rates, and the intensity of feelings we all had in high school is one factor.
According to the World Health Organization, tobacco use kills more than five million people every year – more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. If current trends continue, tobacco could be responsible for more than eight million deaths per year by 2030 – nearly the equivalent of the entire population of New York City.
Thank you all for your support over the past four years. With the majority of the ballots counted, it appears that I will not be returning to the Washington State Senate for a second term. We fought a hard campaign, but as we’re seeing all across the state and the country, it was a tough election year for incumbent Democrats.
As I write this your Seattle Mariners are wrapping up a dismal year, losing 100 games and now planning golf vacations.
The opinions expressed below are the collaboration of Kent Reporter Publisher Polly Shepherd and Editor Laura Pierce.
Send your letters and comments to Laura Pierce at lpierce@kentreporter.com
