Monday, February 21, 2011
The Year Lakewood Found a Voice
Not bad for the second-largest city in Washington's second-largest county.
The annual report for 2010 in Lakewood is pretty cheery. I'm afraid to read it, you have to click on that link and let a PDF light up your computer screen. The curse of a PDF is that it's hard to search from the Internet, but the document has a lot of good information. It's worth the time to plow through it. I'd encourage you to look at it.
The one thing you can't put in a political, polished annual report are the political victories. There are three of them that amaze even me, and I fought for all of them.
If you think back to 16 years ago, we were not even a city; you could not talk about clout. During the past year, Lakewood won some major victories at the federal, state and local level.
County: We stopped an illegal tax. Hardly anyone knows about this, but the country tired to impose a bizarre flood control tax on your property (if you own property here). Lakewood led the legal challenge to stop it. More reading here.
State: Our neighbors at Camp Murray decided they knew what was good for Lakewood and demanded Lakewood authorize a particular new route into the facillity. On behalf of the people of Tillicum - as well as the need to plan appropriately for all the people who drive I-5- our city demanded proper planning. More info here
Federal: And then there's the whole Amtrak proposal (that's it's popular name, though it's a project of the state Department of Transportation). This is the equally bizarre plan to spend millions to save Portland-Seattle commuters a couple minutes. And maybe we won't win. Two massive layers of government, federal and state, are pushing. But the state and federal government agreed to properly plan and evaluate. Now the decision has been pushed off until 2012. More info here about the past; and then more info here about the future
Lakewood cannot claim all the credit for all three of these developments, but in each of these cases, Lakewood was at the center of the effort. That's a record of 3-0 dealing with governments much vaster than a government of a city of 60,000. Not bad.
Of course, these three things are not done. The victories are all temporary. That's the nature of politics; it's hard to call a proposal ever dead. All the proposals are still alive in the heart of government bureaucrats and politicians outside Lakewood. The county may yet try to tax us, the state will use its leverage to demand change at Camp Murray, and all sorts of levels of government will pound on us to accept more dangerous and disruptive rail traffic. Who knows who will 'win,' if there is a win.
The good news is that 15 years into cityhood, Lakewood is there to engage. Sometimes we'll win. Sometimes we'll lose. There's a city to participate and advocate in the discussion and on behalf of us, the citizens - that's the only 'win' we can count on, and it's a big one.
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The annual report for 2010 in Lakewood is pretty cheery. I'm afraid to read it, you have to click on that link and let a PDF light up your computer screen. The curse of a PDF is that it's hard to search from the Internet, but the document has a lot of good information. It's worth the time to plow through it. I'd encourage you to look at it.
The one thing you can't put in a political, polished annual report are the political victories. There are three of them that amaze even me, and I fought for all of them.
If you think back to 16 years ago, we were not even a city; you could not talk about clout. During the past year, Lakewood won some major victories at the federal, state and local level.
County: We stopped an illegal tax. Hardly anyone knows about this, but the country tired to impose a bizarre flood control tax on your property (if you own property here). Lakewood led the legal challenge to stop it. More reading here.
State: Our neighbors at Camp Murray decided they knew what was good for Lakewood and demanded Lakewood authorize a particular new route into the facillity. On behalf of the people of Tillicum - as well as the need to plan appropriately for all the people who drive I-5- our city demanded proper planning. More info here
Federal: And then there's the whole Amtrak proposal (that's it's popular name, though it's a project of the state Department of Transportation). This is the equally bizarre plan to spend millions to save Portland-Seattle commuters a couple minutes. And maybe we won't win. Two massive layers of government, federal and state, are pushing. But the state and federal government agreed to properly plan and evaluate. Now the decision has been pushed off until 2012. More info here about the past; and then more info here about the future
Lakewood cannot claim all the credit for all three of these developments, but in each of these cases, Lakewood was at the center of the effort. That's a record of 3-0 dealing with governments much vaster than a government of a city of 60,000. Not bad.
Of course, these three things are not done. The victories are all temporary. That's the nature of politics; it's hard to call a proposal ever dead. All the proposals are still alive in the heart of government bureaucrats and politicians outside Lakewood. The county may yet try to tax us, the state will use its leverage to demand change at Camp Murray, and all sorts of levels of government will pound on us to accept more dangerous and disruptive rail traffic. Who knows who will 'win,' if there is a win.
The good news is that 15 years into cityhood, Lakewood is there to engage. Sometimes we'll win. Sometimes we'll lose. There's a city to participate and advocate in the discussion and on behalf of us, the citizens - that's the only 'win' we can count on, and it's a big one.
