Why you should say no to tax increases: Metro reforms save 150,000 hours of service

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

Remember a few months ago when Metro came to King County voters and said if you don’t raise your taxes, we are going to cut hundreds of thousands of hours of service?

They said 555,000 bus hours a year were going to be cut. I told you at the time they’re not going to cut that much. They always say things like that to get you to vote for whatever they’re pushing. Then, when you say no, suddenly that worst-case scenario never happens. It’s why you should almost always say no to tax increases and why King County was right to say no to Metro.

In a news conference Wednesday, Metro Transit General Manager Kevin Desmond said they found enough savings to limit the cuts to 400,000 bus service hours a year, instead of 550,000.

And he says if Seattle voters approve new transit taxes this fall, the city could actually gain more bus service instead of just holding the line against cuts.

Desmond says lower costs for new electric trolleys, more efficient bus scheduling, and job cuts helped improve Metro’s finances.

In other words, if the voters hadn’t said no, they wouldn’t have gotten more efficient. They wouldn’t have done the job cuts. They wouldn’t have had more efficient bus scheduling. They would have stayed inefficient.

That’s why you must force them to get efficient. You must say no to raising your taxes.

And when they say if you vote yes that they’ll add service next year, how many times have we been lied to on that?

When King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski was in the studio with me pushing for the tax increase for King County Metro; I called Metro out on that. Here’s what I said to Dembowski:

“In 2005, there was a tax increase and what was promised to the voters was if you vote for this, we will increase routes by 20 percent by 2016. So the people of King County said OK that sounds good. We’re two years away from 2016 and now we’re told if we don’t vote for another tax increase, we’re going to cut routes by 17 percent. We were just blatantly lied to?”

Yes we were. The voters of King County wisely said no this last time. We’ll see what the voters of Seattle say.

Hopefully, they won’t buy that they’ll actually see an increase in service. Metro will just go back to being more inefficient, have jobs that are unnecessary, have routes that are unnecessary. That’s what they do with our money.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.