Dori: Nefarious reason why Seattle NHL team hired Rob Johnson

Seattle City Councilmember Rob Johnson, who is not running for another term, has been hired by the new Seattle NHL team as a transportation adviser, as the Seattle Times reported.

I would love for the NHL to be successful here in Washington, but this is an unfathomably bad start for the Seattle NHL team — hiring a provable liar to such a prestigious position.

And there is a particularly nefarious reason why Rob Johnson is moving to this new gig. If you live in Queen Anne, you’d better be aware of what is going on here and how sleazy Seattle politics can get.

As you know if you listen to this show, bicycle lobbying groups such as the Cascade Bicycle Club got Rob Johnson elected. They wanted to tear up vehicle lanes, put bike lanes in, and get people out of their cars.

What have we accomplished? We’ve spent $100 million on bike lanes, and we’ve seen the percentage of bicycle commuters drop dramatically. It has been a disaster. With our hills and our rainy weather, Seattle is never going to be a huge bicycle city.

RELATED: LID sets dangerous precedent for entire region

As you may remember, Rob Johnson wanted to essentially destroy the Wedgwood neighborhood with a transportation project; the project would take out one lane of traffic in each direction of 35th Avenue Northeast and remove parking spaces on which the mom n’ pop shops on 35th depend, all in order to put in bike lanes.

I had small business owners calling me, distraught. They said, “We’re teetering on the brink already — this is going to ruin us.”

In February of last year, Rob Johnson stated that he had only just found out that his constituents were opposed to the project. But as we later found from the group in opposition, who obtained city texts and emails through records requests, Rob Johnson was told that 68 percent of the neighborhood was opposed to the project via email back in December 2016 — 14 months earlier.

He was also told about it repeatedly in the months after that. He wasn’t there to do the bidding of his taxpaying constituents; he was there to do the bidding of the bike zealots who got him his council seat.

This is a guy who just lied. And when he said that he wasn’t going to run for reelection, he said he had received death threats over the 35th Avenue issue. But when he was asked for the police reports, he said he didn’t file any. Really? You and your family received death threats and you didn’t feel the need to file a police report? That’s almost unheard of.

Let’s get to the really nefarious part of this. Why would the Seattle NHL team hire this proven liar to be their transportation adviser?

On the Seattle waterfront, there is a project that city leaders have been thirsting after called the LID, or local improvement district. They want all of the property owners — including elderly couples who bought condos 25 years ago at a then-modest price, long before downtown property values skyrocketed — to pay $160 million for a new Seattle waterfront park.

A LID like this is unprecedented. I said that if you let this happen in one neighborhood, the city will begin creating neighborhood taxing districts like this until everybody is soaked.

After the LID, a source tells me that the city will want to create a beautiful boulevard to the new hockey — and maybe basketball — arena at the current KeyArena site. And guess who will get to pay for it? The homeowners and business owners in that neighborhood.

I guarantee you, 99 percent of the people who will come to the arena don’t live in Queen Anne; they’ll come from other parts of Seattle, the Eastside, Pierce County, Snohomish County. They’re not going to walk to the arena. So the property owners in Lower Queen Anne will have to pay for visitors to come to this newly renovated stadium.

But it goes beyond that. What it really is, is that the City of Seattle has some developers who would love to get their hands on hundreds of millions of citizen tax dollars, and this is the new nefarious plan through which to do that. I’ve been telling you this ever since the LID was first talked about.

I’ll tell you something else that very few people know about. To get that waterfront LID pushed in, the north boundary was going to be Denny Way. The city said, “We’re going to go easier on you. We’re going to move the northern boundary down to Wall Street.” Why? Because they need the area between Denny and Wall as part of the new Queen Anne LID.

What this is is a way to take everybody in the city, without any say in this, and hit them with a lump-sum tax up to $5,000. It’s a massive wealth transfer from property owners, private citizens, to the City of Seattle, and to developers who stand to make billions.

Do you think that Rob Johnson got hired by the Seattle NHL team for transportation? We know he’s a liar. I’ve proven that he’s a liar. He is there so that they can do this new local taxing district. He knows all the ins and outs of how to maneuver that through the city council that he is still a member of through the end of this year.

The march will continue. Next, each Magnolia resident will get a $5,000 bill to pay for a new bridge. Ballard, are you sick of the heroin addicts on Market Street? We’ll put in a LID to create a park to make things really pretty for the addicts.

And by the way, what is Rob Johnson the bike zealot going to do with hockey transportation? One of my listeners wrote in asking if they have pedal-powered Zambonis. Another texter suggested the penalty box could be a parklet. I suppose he could also take away half the ice and put in a bike lane so that the cyclists could ride their bikes during the game — they’re already wearing helmets anyway. Who cares if we gridlock the hockey players?

What other amazing NHL innovations can Rob Johnson bring to the league? If you have any other thoughts, please share them with me.

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