On ballots that went out last week, voters have two choices to make to determine the future of Seattle’s newest plan for housing.
The first is whether the developer should be funded at all. The next choice — regardless of the previous answer — is how.
Option 1A is with a new employer tax on all salaries over $1 million a year. Backers hope the 5% tax would raise as much as $50 million a year to be spent on buying and, eventually, developing housing that would be cost-controlled and owned by taxpayers.
Option 1B is to fund the developer with $10 million a year in existing city funding — specifically the city’s JumpStart tax on large corporations in Seattle.
I’m mystified by all these ‘centrist’ officials in our fine liberal city. Is it because the only newspaper is acres to the right of its readers, along with KOMO and KIRO and who knows about the rest…
That’s a big chunk of it, yes. KOMO is owned by Sinclair media, KIRO isn’t much better. Fox13 is fucking fox, so I won’t even bother. The Times is Hearst Corporation. So the vast majority of media sources here are directly owned by institutions that have a vested interest in maintaining status quo.
The Stranger is still independent, but the quality has suffered greatly over the last 10+ years.
Also, this is partly a natural pendulum swing back to the right. A lot of people were upset after the Sawant experiment (debacle?), but instead of finding better leftist politicians, we just fled back to the centrist, corporate bullshit that led us down the Sawant path in the first place.
Not to quibble, I hate quibblers, but the old P-I was Hearst. The Times is ‘independent’, but owned by a big-money local family .
Count me among the folks who seriously liked Sawant. Abrasive, sure she was. But she made things happen, sometimes good things.