Josh Brown to address KAPO

Kitsap County Commissioner Josh Brown will speak to the Kitsap Alliance of Property Owners monthly membership dinner this Friday, January 25, at Angel's Buffet in East Bremerton. Lively discussion is sure to ensue. More information is here.

Rob McKenna on Property Rights

The Citizens' Alliance for Property Rights will hold its first annual dinner in Auburn on Thursday, February 7. Rob McKenna is the featured speaker and the menu looks good too. For more information and to register, click here.

Jan Angel running in the 26th

Jan Angel, the only Kitsap County Commissioner to advocate for local control versus the PSRC is running for the legislature in the 26th District.

Tolling and congestion pricing

The PSRC is mentioned in this Crosscut story on proposals for collecting tolls on 520 and using congestion pricing in the Puget Sound area. A report by PSRC staff on these issues is due in late February, according to the article.

Move afoot to replace the PSRC?

The On RAMP blog today covers a discussion in Pierce County between former Transportation Secretary Doug McDonald and representatives of the Regional Access Mobility Partnership.

[McDonald] said that the recent failure of Proposition 1 "convinced him" that he should join [T-Mobile founder John] Stanton and others in seeking a major new agency that would replace groups like Sound Transit and the Puget Sound Regional Council.

RAMP's participants weren't buying. WA Senator Jim Kastama (who was a leader in crafting the Nickel Package as well as the RTID legislation) was quick to disagree. He claimed that King County did a much poorer job of prioritizing investments for the Roads & Transit package, and that this weakness would be magnified in a proportionally representative body--the entity proposed by the RTC.

PRSC Public Hearings, etc.

Three interesting stories in today's Seattle Times for anyone interested in the Puget Sound Regional Council, abuse of government power, and infringements on civil liberties. The Times reports the PSRC will hold public hearings on "Destination 2030" this Thursday in Seattle and next Tuesday in Bellevue (details below). The Kitsap County forum is on Wednesday the 16th at the Sylvan Way Library in Bremerton.

The Times also reports on "Possible fraud at Port focus of criminal probe" (the Port of Seattle is a PSRC member) and "Gregoire calls for sobriety checkpoints."

Save the trees

Protecting rare, unique, and historic trees is a good idea. So is the creation and protection of urban forests. The fact that people in the United States can think about such things is a mark of our affluence as a society. But there are two ways to meet these goals. One way respects people as individuals, upholds liberty, and maximizes value. The other means toward these noble ends disregards people, tramples liberty, and fails to maximize value.

Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer carries a story on tree preservation in the Seattle area, where the means are mostly the second kind. This is apparently a major legislative priority for the session about to begin. It's difficult not to wonder if the environmentalists redirected their efforts and funds away from politics and toward buying land and planting trees, whether they might achieve better results.

Vote Here

There's a new poll in the right hand column asking what you believe government is supposed to do. The old poll results are below the recommended reading section. No surprise, nearly all the readers of this blog favor Kitsap County withdrawing from the Puget Sound Regional Council.

Property Tax Forum

For anyone interested in property taxes, I just posted information about an upcoming forum on the issue over at my 26th District blog.

Lary Coppola weighs in

Port Orchard's new mayor, Lary Coppola, voices his concerns about PSRC at his blog, West Sound Politics.

Two Visions of Planning

A vision from the Left: Planning maximizes the efficiency of government and society, allowing the greatest good for the greatest number. Those opposed to planning don't care about order or efficiency, many just want to protect their own material prosperity, and they would permit the degeneration of our urban and suburban areas into disorder.

A vision from the Right: Efficiency is maximized by allowing individuals to make their own decisions within a system that prevents them from causing actual harm to others. Planning abridges freedom, allowing the powerful to control everyone else and resulting in unforeseen consequences that offset the benefits. Planners simply want power.

To the reading list in the right-hand column, I've added A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell. For anyone interested in the presuppositions that color so much of our political discourse, that explain the conflicting views above, this book is essential. Sowell sketches two fundamental competing visions and reveals how so many policy disputes originate with this basic divide. Excerpts are here at the invaluable Google Books.

PSRC on BKAT

Don't forget to tune into BKAT tomorrow, January 5th, at 11 a.m. to watch last month's PSRC hearing in Kitsap County. Over thirty citizens voiced their concerns about Vision 2040 and the PSRC and three people voiced their support for government planning.

See the New Years post, below, for a full schedule of the rebroadcasts or view BKAT schedules here.

Is PSRC Nothing?

A commenter on this blog has echoed a common defense of the PSRC, that it is a meaningless, powerless body of do-nothing bureaucrats. It won't override local governance, won't tax us, won't really have any effect. Of course, if this is true, we should all feel sorry for the 70+ PSRC staff who are leading such pointless professional lives. And we're not getting a great value for the $10 million a year we taxpayers spend on PSRC.

More likely, PSRC does effect regional planning, does push and pull local decision makers, and does want more power. Vision 2040 certainly sounds like a vision for more planning (that is, government forcing people to do things that they would not otherwise do) and more power for the PSRC.

Global Warming "News"

It turns out the media is hot for some climate stories and cold on others.

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels.

New York Times science columnist John Tierney's full column is here.

Comments Feature Repaired

An alert reader let me know that the comments feature had stopped working. The problem has been resolved. Please email psrcwatch@gmail.com if you have any problems using this site.

The Planning Tax

Regional growth-management planning makes housing unaffordable and contributes to a business-unfriendly environment that slows economic growth. The high housing prices caused by growth-management planning were an essential element of the housing bubble that has recently shaken our economy: for the most part, this bubble was limited to urban regions with growth-management planning.

So begins a recent Cato Institute publication, "The Planning Tax."

Young people should be especially interested in discovering how PSRC-type planning policies are driving up the cost of real estate, making it harder and harder to purchase that first home.

NYMBYism vs. the GMA

Check out Eric Earling's latest post at Sound Politics to find out how NYMBYism and the GMA are poised for conflict this year in Snohomish County.

PSRC Vision 2040 Would Harm Kitsap County

A great letter by Tim Matthes was printed in today's Kitsap Sun.

The Puget Sound Regional Council's Vision 2040 plan will harm the quality of life here in Kitsap County. This plan will increase pollution. This plan will increase traffic and gridlock. This plan will drive up the cost of all housing by creating a shortage of land, but most importantly, this plan will waste billions of our tax dollars.

Tim cites Cato Institute scholar and Oregon native Randal O'Toole, who blogs at The Antiplanner and has a new book out that I plan to read in this new year.

You might also get a chuckle from this fun letter by Warren Nadeau, also printed in today's Sun.

"Silver lining" to global warming

Just before Christmas, Dave Lindorff claimed the high ground in the Baltimore Chronicle. You see, the writer and activist is sure that "in the lifetime of my two cats" global warming is going to raise sea level so much that about half of the "red" parts of the country will wind up underwater. The other half will be blighted with drought. And he's looking forward to this, if only to tell "future refugee troglodytes ... 'Shut up. We told you this would happen.'"

Sounds like Lindorff is lining up to be the next Paul Ehrlich, with an attitude (and cats).

Happy New Year!

One of the best articles about the PSRC in 2007 was written by Bob Benze in the Kitsap Sun. The Evergreen Freedom Foundation blogged on it here. It remains important reading in 2008!

Testimony at the last PSRC public hearing in Kitsap County was more than 10 to 1 opposed to Vision 2040 and Kitsap's membership in the Seattle-dominated government agency. The hearing was recorded and should air on BKAT on January 5th (11 a.m.), 10th (3 p.m.), 12th (9 p.m.), and 14th (11 a.m.). If you watch, send a letter to the Kitsap Sun, Port Orchard Independent, or another local paper with your reaction to the hearing.