Dear President Obama,
Thank you for your inaugural call to action. Now, down to business.
Not to brag, but in Pierce County, we’re deep into the tasks you encouraged Americans to take up. Police officers and city and county officials refer to our thousands of activists as “force multipliers.” Give our governments money for more cops, more housing, more environmental projects, and we bring the volunteer power to get the most out of every dollar.
So there’s no point in being shy here. If you give us the right kind of stimulus money, we’ll make it sing. In fact, we’ll belt out grand opera.
We know Seattle and King County have the pull when it comes to public money. But they’re lousy on the push to spend it wisely and promptly.
They recently blew $125 million talking about building a monorail that will never be anything more substantial than a sore point. Because we are in the Northwest, we are mandated to translate that sum into coffee products: the equivalent of 40 million vanilla lattes and 2.2 million coconut steamers. Think how many Starbucks layoffs it might have prevented.
Now, after eight years of blathering over the replacement for the waterfront viaduct, Seattle, King County and the state say they have a plan. We hope so, but the shoveling is a distant dream. We suspect they agreed on a tunnel only because they caught a whiff of federal money.
Whatever you do, Mr. President, don’t give them a penny until they’ve sorted out every precious point they feel it’s their civic duty to debate.
You want stimulus money pouring into workers’ checking accounts, pronto. Here’s our promise: If you send cash our way, we will not talk it into oblivion.
Budgets, we understand, are complicated. Federal money flows back to the people through conduits so complex they might as well have been designed by a gang of megalomaniacal plumbers. So pardon the simplicity of this list of our shovelicious projects. They are what the money would do, not how it would get here.
• Salishan: This Hope VI project is transforming public housing on Tacoma’s East Side into a lovely, safe, environmentally sound community. The people who live there are diverse in age, income and ethnicity, yet they have created a welcoming neighborhood. The first phases are done, but more needs to be built, and funding is scarce.
Paying for that would add to the infrastructure of affordable housing, which is needed now more than ever. It would get the hard-hit construction trade back on the job. Through savvy hiring and a successful apprenticeship program, 92 percent of the construction jobs created by Salishan have gone to low-income people, including many current or former residents.
Finish Salishan and you won’t just be building homes. You’ll be developing family-wage careers.
• Flood control: Rivers change. Surfaces, and where they send water, change. Our system of levees was built to protect farmland, not booming development. Every time it fails, individuals, businesses, insurance companies and governments, including the feds, pay tens of millions of dollars. It’s money wasted.
Fund a comprehensive renovation of the system, from levees to critter pads to relocating homes that can’t be protected.
• Bridges: Murray Morgan was a good friend. As a gracious historian he helped shape our sense of place. The Tacoma drawbridge he tended as a young man was named for him, and gave us direct access to port jobs, recreation and merchants. Reopening it would be a splashy start. We have a long list of bridge work needed to secure our infrastructure.
• Sidewalks: They’re so humble, but so useful. They make it safe to walk to the store, get exercise, make friends in the neighborhood and keep eyes on the knuckleheads. They prevent cars from migrating onto lawns. They create a sense of order.
But they’re too expensive for many homeowners in transitional neighborhoods.
They’d be a low-lying infrastructure, but think of the jobs and safety they’d create.
Thank you for considering this, Mr. President. We’d be happy for you to stop by any time to see our tax dollars at work on the home front.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
