Last week was, politically speaking, a cheerful week for the sea of blue partisans that is Seattle. Nationally, President Bush and the Republicans got a spanking many Seattleites have dreamed of giving for six long years - including, on the Eastside, the possible ousting of Dave Reichert from a district that has never elected a Democrat.
Statewide, two terribly regressive ballot measures, Initiatives 920 and 933, went down in flames; by contrast, an alternative-energy initiative, I-937, passed.
Voters also beat back a right-wing state Supreme Court challenge to Justice Susan Owens.
The Wednesday after Election Day was an unusually good day to be a liberal.
But lost in the "Blue Wave!" headlines, the details of Seattle's local ballot items told a much more mixed story. Sure, the votes cast were predictably liberal.
The Sonics' effort to have taxpayers pony up for a new arena was rejected by a staggering three-quarters of voters, a spasm of taxpayer anger for which the new Oklaho-ma owners can thank the Mariners and Seahawks and festering, decade-long anger over having a billion dollars' worth of stadia rammed down voters' throats.
But otherwise, we locals showed our usual, notorious willingness to tax ourselves silly, approving not only a long-overdue King County measure to expand bus service, but a citywide pothole proposition that comes very close to being an indefinite, open-ended tax.
The ballot omissions
Why is this a problem, when these are both surely necessary and appropriate functions for local government? It's a problem because of what wasn't on this year's ballot.
Most notably, Seattle City Council decided in September - just after learning that cost estimates for a waterfront tunnel had risen by a billion dollars and that a poll showed voters favoring a new viaduct instead - to not put a question on the ballot asking voters our opinion on what to do with the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
A solid majority of council members (as well as the mayor) support the tunnel option, and so the ballot-measure idea was quietly dropped - because council members feared that we wouldn't vote the way they wanted.
In other words, democracy is fine, so long as the rabble vote the correct way. (If this sounds familiar, it's because this is how the United States has conducted foreign policy for at least 60 years.)
Unopposed candidates
Compounding the problem, also absent from this year's ballot was any semblance of democracy in electing local officeholders.
City Councilmember Sally Clark, appointed to replace Jim Compton last winter and facing an election to fill out the rest of her term, ran essentially unopposed (save for fringe permacandidate Stan Lippman), a testimony to how expensive it is to run for citywide office with a City Council composed only of at-large seats.
But our state legislative offices were even worse. The vast majority of Seattle's 100-percent Democratic Olympia delegation was completely unopposed for reelection. Of the 12 seats in which more than one name appeared on the ballot, every incumbent got more than two-thirds of the vote. In only one race - the ridiculously crowded contest to replace Ed Murray in the 43rd District - was there even a real choice in September's primary.
In other words, unlike congressional Republicans this year, local officeholders faced - and will likely continue to face - no threat whatsoever of needing to be accountable to voters.
Combine that with Seattle voters' well-earned reputation for bottomless pockets, newly cemented by our passage of two more transportation measures, and we face a situation where state legislators will likely conclude that the costs for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct, replacing and expanding the 520 bridge, expanding Sound Transit's light rail and next year's scheduled Regional Transportation Investment District (RTID) ballot measure can all be foisted off on us all-too-willing taxpayers.
When will it be 'enough'?
The problem, of course, is that we taxpayers have finite amounts of money. At the risk of invoking Tim Eyman's ghost, at some point local voters will say, "Enough." It may well be with 2007's RTID and Sound Transit measures (likely to be folded into one package) - especially if the state and city have, at that point, already decided on the most generous versions of the waterfront and 520 projects on our behalf.
The result: two snazzy, new highways, more gridlock and that much less in the way of non-automotive transit options for another generation or so. And the legislators who made it possible need not even worry about reelection to what are essentially lifetime sinecures.
So, sure, celebrate the outcomes of what was on the ballot last week. But be afraid, very afraid, of the items that weren't.
Geov Parrish is a nationally syndicated columnist, radio host and Eat the State! co-founder. He can be reached via needitor@nwlink.com.
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