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In a Conflict Between People/Voters and the State, Who Wins?
Last year, the Voters of Washington State approved an Initiative that reduced car-tab taxes to $30. This same initiative has been voted on at least three times and the state managed to get it overturned twice. The third time, a coalition of cities, counties, and transit agencies has sued in an effort to keep it from taking effect, claiming the initiative is unconstitutional and would have a devastating impact on transit projects statewide. The units of government immediately sued, stating that because the initiative would reduce funds to themselves, it was unconstitutional. They are basically saying that because they are entitled to those funds for transit projects, the People’s approved initiative could not stand.
The state agencies have claimed that the ballot title was misleading, and the Voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. If the ballot title had NOT been “misleading” then the people would have understood the effects on all those transit projects, and would never have approved that initiative. Assumption: The voters of the State of Washington are too stupid to read the detailed initiative that was pretty clear what funds might be reduced, and whose ox would be gored. Actually, most Washington voters understand very well that a goodly portion of their auto registration fees goes not for maintaining highways in the state, but for transit projects that few of them actually use. The voters are pretty smart about this, and are continually beating down the doors of the Department of Transportation, and insisting that their car-tab fees should go primarily for road maintenance and not for public transit.
Every time the people approve a similar initiative, the affected agencies sue to overturn the will of the People. Once again, the Seattle Supreme Court is considering the question of who should win when the People approve an initiative affecting state agencies, the People or the State. We can, once again, guess where this will be heading.
Published in General
My experience in Colorado has nearly convinced me that referendums are generally a bad idea. Although living in California also gave me that impression.
Colorado voters passed TABOR, the taxpayer bill of rights, in a referendum. But a few years later the same voters passed a referendum mandating public education spending increases each year.
So, essentially the legislators were given contradictory mandates from the voters, cut taxes and increase spending. Better to simply vote for legislators and let them be held accountable at the ballot box.
These days I live in Indiana and we don’t have many statewide referendums. That’s a good thing. We also send an overwhelming majority of Republicans to the state legislature.
I am reminded of when former New York City mayor Ed Koch was asked, after being defeated, if he would run for mayor again. Koch said, “The people have spoken. Now they must be punished.”
Yes, I did grow up in California, move to Colorado at age 30 and move to Indiana in my mid-40s. I will keep moving out of Blue states until I run out of places to run to.
Very true. When I first voted against light rail in Austin, many eons ago before becoming a reactionary therefore inclined to vote no on principle alone, It was precisely because it cut out the university, which is really the only thing that would make light rail attractive in Austin. Commuter systems work in places that are hub and spoke, like NYC, DC, and Chicago. They don’t work in places that are widely dispersed like Dallas, Houston, or LA. It actually could work for part of Austin with some forethought. but not run by Cap Metro and not along the current track. As it is the only thing they really managed to do is close down an important freight line (Missouri-Pacific) for 4 hrs a day? While taking a relatively small amount of people where they don’t want to go. Once again an important life lesson. Things that work one place may not work someplace else. This is why Federalizing every problem is a real bad idea.
And they fly into a rage at an $800 toilet seat in the military budget . . .
The only way it would have worked, from a passenger volume standpoint, would have been if they had run the line down Lamar Boulevard from south of the U.S. 183 interchange, since that’s where the potential riders are. But that would have ballooned the costs even higher, since they did it on the cheap by using the existing rail line, which by the time it passes the north side of downtown is a mile east of the UT campus and the Capitol, before turning west at the river. Using that route meant it never was going to attract riders.
True the only real solution on paper would have been to go underground; however, that is a virtual impossibility in Austin. At least in anyway that would be economically feasible. As I said before things that work in other places are not guaranteed to work someplace else. Austin is a weird place for traffic. Primarily because people live and work all over the area. Therefore it isn’t really a place where transit works. You don’t have people who live in the suburbs and outlying areas trying to get to downtown and back. Actually it is more like everyone who lives south works north and vice versa. Downtown is really just a hindrance to most commuters. The important thing to realize is Austin has Portland envy, so Portland has a train so Austin has to have a train, Portland has bike paths, so Austin has to have bike paths, etc. This is why whenever Portland has a harebrained idea I get nervous.
The problems we have began about 30 years ago with a huge influx of people from California and New York fleeing high taxes and out-of-control housing prices. Slowly but surely they’ve managed to recreate the problems from which they fled.
It wasn’t a toilet seat, it was a whole toilet system in an Navy airplane that does relatively hard maneuvers. It has to be strong and light. A great deal at $800.
https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-will-pay-you-to-design-a-space-toilet-that-works-in-lunar-gravity/
Austin’s progressive leadership of 50-60 years ago took on the idea that if you didn’t build any other highways besides I-35 through the city, or an outer Beltway around the city, people wouldn’t create urban sprawl across the area. But at the same time, the state and local government kept doing things like touting Austin as the state’s tech center in the early 1980s, which assured that more people would overwhelm the available highways.
I follow our elections very closely watching as each county comes in. This state is overwhelmingly populated by common sense voters —- until the tallies come in from King County, home of the city of Seattle. To a lesser extent, Snohomish County and Jefferson County confirm the nonsense of Seattle voters.
That initiative passed and the first thing the transit critters did was sue to stop it. The transit agencies do not answer to the people.
They irony of this whole thing is it was called a “Smart” growth plan at the time. In fairness 30 years ago when I first moved to Austin it was a sleepy little town that closed up tight as a drum when the university and the legislature were out, but now its at least 20 years behind on road construction.
I stand corrected. And the hammer?
Austin metro wasn’t much bigger than Waco metro in 1960. It was LBJ’s rise to the White House and the perks he helped bestow on his hometown area that kick-started the growth in the late 1960s, but it didn’t explode until both Democrats and Republicans in the early 80s decided Austin would be Texas’ tech hub, to compete with Silicon Valley.
The fact that UT and the state government already attracted progressives to the area like flies just caused the problems created by their conflicting attitudes to soar, and it was only when the problem could no longer be denied 25 years ago that you ended up with things like the light rail push and toll road system, to make up for the highways Austin should have built when Johnson was tossing highway money around in the late 60s, but didn’t (the positive thing you can say for LBJ and road expansion here is he made sure every main rural highway west of Austin was a four-lane highway around 1965, even though the traffic wasn’t there to justify four-lane highways for another quarter century. It made it easier for tourists to visit his Johnson City ranch).
That’s because a public transport workers union can’t bring it to a screeching stop like it can do to a metro train seat.
Government agencies ought not have standing to sue to overturn ballot initiatives. Only the people should be able to sue these agencies. These agencies are accountable to the people. Counties, agencies, they work for the people of the state and county and region. They’re not supposed to have a will of their own. If the planners got a bill approved knowing they wouldn’t be able to pay for it, they don’t get to act like they can extort anything they need from the public. They are making people work for the government, instead of vice-versa. This is like The Wizard of Oz. Now you understand why they nicknamed Seattle The Emerald City.
Of course, then the courts just decide that it’s not “substantially similar” and there it goes again.
What, they’re not going with Howard Wolowitz again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5iFc7Gn9nM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVcSyZznXEs
That might be going too far.
Let’s imagine the people vote for an initiative to confiscate all firearms, or to enslave doctors to work without pay so we can have “universal” health care. The government can’t comply with the initiative. This is why we do not have an absolute democracy. The government should then sue to prevent the initiative from becoming law or at least keep it from being enforceable for the unconstitutional parts.
No. In neither of those examples does “the government” sustain harm – people do. Let the people [from your examples, gun owners, or doctors] who are harmed sue.
That is an excellent point. I am chagrined to realize I didn’t catch that aspect of the problem myself.
You are dead right on. How in the world have we come to this?
It’s likely because suing the government costs individuals money, in addition to what they already pay in taxes. Taxes which support, among other things, the government suing “us.”
One of the other. Were I in the government and a proposition voted to force me to do that, I would not resign and I would not comply and I would sue to stop it.
What is a “car-tab tax?”
The sticker showing current registration that you put on a vehicle license plate, is commonly known as a “tab.”
“Tag” is often used too.
Some Washington State background. Washington does not have an income tax. For many, many years, much of the money used to operate the state government was in car-registration fees. The tax was calculated on the market value of the vehicle, gradually going down until the car had, according to the State, depreciated fully, when taxes going forward would be minimal. With all the new safety mandates from the federal government, cars started to get way more expensive, as did yearly registration fees. The State also added subsidies for mass transit to the car-tab taxes, so the people of the entire state were paying for bus service for big cities (of which there are basically three-Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane). Supposedly, gasoline taxes, of which Washington has one of the highest in the country, were supposed to go for road maintenance, until the State started diverting that money for…wait for it…Mass Transit! Government Gadfly Tim Eyman sponsored an Initiative to reduce car-tab taxes to $30 years ago, and it passed. Shortly thereafter, the State started adding more charges back in, so another Initiative was started, passed,….repeat.
The state government has been wringing its hands for years, bemoaning those initiatives that stopped them from collecting their funds from drivers every year. And of course the Leftists in Seattle have been agitating for a state income tax, too. It never ends.
Like in the Monty Python bit, “To boost the Seattle economy, I would tax everyone living everywhere else.”
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ogsqu
We also have major taxes on liquor and cigarettes, making up one of the most expensive in the country to buy liquor. By the way, the state also collects a gigantic amount of money from Lotto tickets. It was originally supposed to be used for schools, but that hasn’t worked out too well. Is there someplace we can find an accounting of how much money goes into the Lotto and where it’s spent?