Muni League Not Qualified Rating No Surprise

My recent email from the Municipal League of King County informing me of my “Not Qualified” was no surprise.   The email comments “Candidate Evaluation Committee members felt that you had a low level of involvement in civic affairs. It might also reflect a lack of knowledge of the workings of city or county government. If you have previously held office, the Committee may be concerned that you did not produce effective results” are perfectly valid.   I did not fit the “template” they used to determine qualifications.

What they didn’t recognize was my primary goal for running is to inform the entire eastside about the monumental fraud Sound Transit and the WSDOT have been and will continue to perpetrate with the East Link light rail program.  The committee thought I was some sort of Don Quixote type charging at windmills.   They couldn’t believe some retired Boeing Engineer’s claim that Sound Transit and WSDOT had lied for years about East Link and that the legislators and the media had willingly gone along with them. 

The candidate evaluation committee couldn’t believe ST lied when their Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) claimed light rail was like adding 10 lanes of freeway across Lake Washington or claimed adding a 4^th lane to the outer roadways would provide enough capacity to accommodate all cross-lake vehicles.  Sound Transit used that outer roadway capacity lie to convince the Kittitas judge to let them install light rail on center roadway.

The committee couldn’t accept the fact Sound Transit has spent the last 15 years wasting hundreds of millions promoting cross-lake light rail along with studies of nearly every conceivable route through the eastside.  Especially when ST undoubted knew bus rapid transit, or BRT, could have reduced congestion not only on the bridge, but throughout eastside using only a tiny fraction of that time and money.   

Again, my chances of winning are minimal at best.  I chose to challenge a many term incumbent because his response to my emails on East Link was  “Get over it, Sound Transit is going to install light rail across the bridge come hell or high water”.  My campaign is to prove him wrong, and if I happen to replace him so much the better.