SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: How Seattle creates problems, then charges you to fix them

Oct 9, 2018, 10:31 PM | Updated: Oct 10, 2018, 11:48 am

Crews work in front of the the city's new Temporary Bridge Shelter for the homeless Friday, Dec. 1,...

Crews work in front of the the city's new Temporary Bridge Shelter for the homeless Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, in San Diego. The first of three shelters opened Friday, which will eventually provide beds for up to 700 people, as the city struggles to control a homeless crisis gripping the region. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

(AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

According to a new story from KIRO Radio reporter Hanna Scott, Seattle might get huge dormitory-style tents for homeless people, full of rows of bunk beds. Apparently that’s what Los Angeles is doing, which Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda called “a great example.”

Wait, LA is a great example? We just reported Monday that LA has a typhus outbreak caused by all of the fleas in their homeless camps. Yeah, let’s follow the Los Angeles model.

Let’s get one thing straight — nothing is going to change unless we do something about the drug problem. King County and Snohomish County have legalized personal possession of drugs. It is an epidemic. The police are not arresting anyone for drugs. We are not prosecuting anyone for drugs. We have become the magnet destination in the United States of America for drug dealers and users because of our attitude and approach to drugs.

RELATED: National Geographic documentary exposes Seattle as drug dealers’ paradise

Don’t believe me? Federal Way police got a call about from a mother in Louisiana about her adult son, who is a known transient and drug user. The mother had received an anonymous text message that her son had overdosed in the woods near Federal Way. Our public officials tell us that these are all our neighbors, the kids that we grew up with who just fell on hard times.

No. The people who are raping and attempting to rape women, who are leaving needles everywhere, who are showing up in these homeless encampments, are from out of state. I’m sure over 50 percent of them are, despite that phony study by the accused child rapist mayor.

We are the magnet destination for drug users in the United States. We can pop up all the spring-loaded tents for homeless people that we want. As I’ve said, you can spend a billion dollars on housing for the homeless and get 5,000 people into shelter, but then 6,000 addicts from around the country will come here and replace them because of our attitude toward drugs. Want an example of how messed up our attitude toward drugs is? Fred Podesta, who heads Seattle’s Navigation Team, called the drug addict vagrants the city’s “clients.”

Political speak is amazing. The drug-addicted vagrants coming here from around the nation are not junkies, they are “clients.” They are the “clients” of the taxpayers. They are the “clients” of the people whose car windows they are smashing and back doors they are kicking in.

My point is, you can spring up as many giant tents for homeless people as you want, but you’ve created this problem because of your drug policies around here.

In Bothell, the mayor and police chief want a massive property tax levy on Bothell residents to pay for issues the city is having with gangs and heroin. Let’s create a problem with our drug policies, let’s attract as many heroin addicts as possible to the region, and then let’s tell the taxpayers that we need hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for dormitory-style tents for homeless people, or we need a massive property tax increase to pay for fighting crime. You create the problem as a government, and then you tax us to come up with a solution to the problem you created in the first place.

Another example of that is Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s plan to toll all of downtown Seattle. What does our government do? Let’s create the worst traffic imaginable. Let’s take away car lanes and give them to the bicyclists who don’t use them. Let’s take the viaduct and shrink the capacity, with the most expensive option to replace it — the tunnel, which will end up a billion dollars over budget.

And then, after we’ve taken away car lanes for bicycles and reduced the capacity of the viaduct to two-thirds of what it was, let’s tell people that you need to pay a toll if you want to drive into Seattle — for a problem government leaders created.

This is what we’re seeing all around here. We create the problem and then charge you to solve it. Hey, but let’s keep voting for the Democrats — they are doing such a great job for our region.

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Dori: How Seattle creates problems, then charges you to fix them