The Seattle Times published an interesting article August 3rd that outlined the issues that have had divided rulings in the Washington State Supreme Court recently.

Here are three from a list of ten that they compiled that have to do with transportation administration issues:

“Consider the following 10 questions, all the subject of divided rulings:

• Whether a transit agency can withhold documents by broadly asserting attorney-client privilege;

• Whether a transit agency can take private property permanently to satisfy a short-term need;

• Whether a vague notice on an Internet page is sufficient for a public meeting on the taking of private property“

1. The first example was whether or not an agency can hide behind their lawyers and deny public information that citizens should be able to access under public disclosure laws.

2. The second example is whether an agency can take your land permanently (if they need it for temporary staging purposes for a project) when they could just lease it from you and return it after the job is done (they want to profit from the sale).

3. The third example is whether a completely buried and vague reference to an agency’s interest in taking a property is enough notice to the property owners of Washington- the legislature has decided, that no, it’s not enough notice, and written a new law to AT LEAST give folks proper notice via a registered letter (The Miller case vs. Sound Transit precipitated the new law).

Think it’s not important who you vote for for Washington State Supreme Court?

Ask Ken & Barbara Miller, whose property was taken by Sound Transit. It matters.

KIRO Team 7 Investigations have prompted: “the State Auditor to launch an inquiry into why hundreds of thousands of your transportation tax dollars are being funneled to a charity.”

“Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne spent weeks unraveling how some major transit agencies might be skirting laws on lobbying and gifting.

The law generally prohibits government entities from collecting taxes from you, then using that money to lobby for ballot measures or tax increase initiatives. We discovered that Sound Transit, King County Metro and some other taxing authorities may have figured out a way around that.”

The whole article is pretty interesting- Sound Transit and other public agencies, as well as cities are all giving money to Transportation Choices Coalition:

“The Washington Policy Center says it found out that Sound Transit donated at least $156,000 to Transportation Choices in the past 10 years. That’s something we confirmed through Open Records.

WPC transportation director Mike Ennis says, “Even the most casual taxpayers can see the conflict of interest when you have a public agency giving money to an organization that lobbies on behalf of that organization. That’s not what public money is intended for. It doesn’t matter how noble the cause is for some of these groups.”

Again, using the Open Records Ace, KIRO Team 7 Investigators discovered Sound Transit is just one of at least 15 government agencies donating your tax money to Transportation Choices via something labeled “membership dues.”

Sound Transit recently donated $22,000.

King County Metro handed over $30,000.

Other transit agencies donating to TCC via membership dues in 2008 include: Community Transit, Pierce Transit, Intercity Transit, Whatcom Transportation Authority, Ben Franklin/Richland Transit, Spokane Transit and Kitsap County Transit.

Other government agencies that contributed your tax dollars to TCC’s charity include the cities of Seattle, Kirkland, Redmond, Sammamish and Edmonds. The Port of Seattle donated as well.”

The concern is expressed here:

“We called State Auditor Brian Sonntag and showed him the financial relationships we uncovered. He tells us he will open a formal inquiry.

Sonntag told Halsne during on on-camera interview, “They can’t ‘give’ your tax money away.

There has to be a benefit.

My first general impression is that there are a lot of questions — a lot of questions that need to be answered on behalf of citizens and tax payers. This is a lot of money.”

Washington law says that if your tax money is given to charity, there has to be a specific return, something of documented value given back. Lobbying can’t legally be that value and, according to Sonntag the label “membership dues” isn’t specific enough.“Membership to what? That would be my first question. I mean, it is a club? An organization? What are your dues paying for? That’s a question that citizens have a right to an answer.”

The audit will at least point out how pervasive this practice is.

Read the full article at: http://www.kirotv.com/investigations/16811658/detail.html

See the article by Hunter George of the News Tribune:

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler told The Daily World, the newspaper in Aberdeen, that she has no plans “now or ever” to endorse fellow Democrat John Ladenburg’s campaign for attorney general.

That’s because he continues to diss her open-government bill that would require local governments to record their executive sessions. The Pierce County Council was fine with it, but lots of other local governments weren’t, so the bill died.

“Local governments are, obviously, still afraid of my bill even now and are trying to come up with every kind of excuse possible to avoid it,” said Kessler, D-Hoquiam.

Local governments afraid of tape recording their executive sessions. That can’t be good.

And remember, John Ladenburg was Sound Transit Chair when the agency’s furtive behavior prompted the Washington State Legislature to create a new law to notify people when agencies are planning to act to take their property.

Ladenburg still defends Sound Transit’s extreme behavior in that matter, and is not supportive of increased government transparency.

Ladenburg was also one of the chief architects of the enormously bloated Sound Transit/Proposition 1 tax proposal that failed in fall 2007, reportedly because taxpayers weren’t able or willing to pay the huge additional cost in taxes.

Is that the recipe for a “people’s advocate” (Attorney General)?

Reporter Larry Lange at the Seattle P-I reports that the Washington State Auditor’s Office is going to conduct, among other things, and audit of Sound Transit to see whether:

• “Whether its publicly disseminated financial information can be understood and is useful.

• The audit also will examine whether its public meetings are convenient for citizens and how “transparent” the agency is.“

Here are a few answers to those questions:

1. Public meetings of the Sound Transit Board are held in the afternoon (4pm) when most people are at work and unable to attend.

Usually the bulk of the people who attend these meetings are:

* paid contractors and consultants who make their living off of Sound Transit’s public funds,

* city representatives that support light rail alignments that bring said tax dollars to their respective cities,

* elected officials whose future candidacies and fundraising abilities depend on appearing to go along & get along with large public agencies such as Sound Transit,

* developers and property owners who would directly benefit from the accompanying land use upzoning (increase in allowed development density) along proposed light rail corridors (see Martin Luther King Way South), and

* a handful of regular citizens and/or agency critics attending in order to speak to the Sound Transit Board.

2. The public is usually instructed that they can only speak about “action items” on the agenda for discussion and direction on by the Sound Transit Board that particular day, by which time, a citizen has little or no impact on the thinking of Board members or the process.

3. Transparency-hmmm. The smallest request for information can result in a redirect to the public information officer, who then requires citizens to ask for information through a public disclosure process which can take weeks or months.

4. Sound Transit routinely cherry picks their result-driven (push) polls & surveys to their desired outcome, and then proclaims broad support for light rail tax packages that is tenuous at best.

5. This is the public agency that hid information (buried so deep in a website) regarding taking the Miller property in Tacoma, that the Washington State Legislature later hastened to create a NEW LAW to protect home and property owners, and REQUIRE Sound Transit to at the very minimum to NOTIFY people by certified letter when they were about to take their property. Does that seem voluntarily transparent?

Does this behavior bleed over into the usefulness or accessibility of the financial information that they provide to the public? Very possibly.

Lange reports that Mindy Chambers, spokesperson for the state Auditor’s Office, says that her office gets more questions about the Seattle-based agency (Sound Transit) “than pretty much anything else.“