SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Instead of wildfire tax, let’s boot Evergreen State to fund fire prevention
Dec 5, 2019, 9:02 AM | Updated: 11:36 am
A wildfire buring near Omak, Washington in August 2015. (Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)
(Stephen Brashear/Getty Images)
While we loudly and clearly stated through I-976 that we wanted some tax savings for a change, Washington State Public Lands Commissioner Hillary Franz announced that she wants a new wildfire tax for wildfire prevention.
She wants to add $12 a year as an insurance surcharge for “the average household.”
Will somebody explain to me how taxing us is going to stop wildfires? And if there is work that needs to be done to stop wildfires, how can that not come out of our record-high $54 billion state budget? Commissioner Franz says that $63 million will be needed to carry out the work. Are you telling me that the politicians in Olympia cannot find $63 million in cuts? I can find it in two seconds.
I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Privatize Evergreen State College, which has had so much enrollment attrition that it is now just the size of a 3A high school — yet we spend $60 million a year on it. There is your wildfire tax right there.
Evergreen is known throughout the country as the most radical leftist college — remember the video of the students taking over the campus and holding the administrators hostage? I’ve said it a million times: There is no way that Washington taxpayers would be asked to fund the most radical right-wing college in the country, yet we are asked to fund the most radical left-wing one.
Dori’s list of budget cuts at the city, county, and state level
Where would money be better spent — clearing underbrush and adding firebreaks to prevent wildfires, or spending it on a radical institution? Which is more important?
This is how we play it in Washington. If you want to cut funds to Evergreen State, you’re anti-education. But if you don’t want the wildfire tax, you must want our state to burn.
I guarantee you, $63 million will not change the wildfire season at all. They make these dire proclamations and then are never held accountable after they get their tax hike and the disaster still happens. It’s amazing — not the games they play, but the fact that the voters remain such chumps when it comes to being played.
Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
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