A bill to continue a statewide program to improve active transportation connectivity in overburdened communities unanimously passed the Senate Thursday.
Senate Bill 6283, sponsored by Sen. T’wina Nobles (D-Fircrest), would eliminate the expiration date for the Sandy Williams Connecting Communities Program, which is set to end in 2027. Williams, a Black community organizer and advocate, worked to address historic injustices created by highway projects in the mid-century. She led the effort to reconnect her Spokane neighborhood after Interstate 90 geographically split it in half.
“Sandy dedicated her life to healing and uplifting Black communities in Spokane,” Nobles said. “By getting rid of the expiration date, we can ensure her legacy lives on and continue to make a difference in our communities most in need.”
Administered by the state Department of Transportation, the program was created as part of the Move Ahead Washington package in 2022 and allocated $50 million over five years to:
- Repair transportation inequities by directing investments to environmentally overburdened, vulnerable, and underserved communities
- Improve access to community destinations and services
- Provide contracting opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses and community-based organizations
The bill now heads to the House for consideration.
These programs always sound good on the surface, but when your transportation, housing, education, food, medical care, communication, and entertainment are all provided by or subsidized by the government (other people’s money), you are 100 percent beholden to that power – the blue bureaucratic plantation.
If you are of such privilege, you may or may never contribute a dime into that system, but you will certainly vote for it because it has become your entire existence.
To do otherwise would seem akin to walking naked into the wilderness. That might actually be cleansing.
For a select minority of people who were actually born with significant disability or who sustained significant injury, these programs are essential.
So many others just pile onto the gravy train. The train is full.
The government just surpassed its previous record for number of people employed within that system, producing nothing, taxing everything.
The national debt is over 33 trillion dollars and mounting.
If we factor all government debt obligations, I have seen figures beyond 100 trillion dollars of interest-bearing debt.
This is being completely ignored by almost everyone, and those who bring it up are pushed into the shadows.
This has been a swelling problem for several generations now, and is perhaps unsolvable short of default.
Growing old after a lifetime of poor decisions and mismanagement is not a disability, it is a state of being.
You know who you are.
Just be honest about it so we can address these real problems honestly.
I have witnessed the bullying tactics and dishonesty of these massive quasi-government transportation authorities first-hand.
I have seen the money that could have built infrastructure, squandered within the system, as the expecting hand reaches again and again into our pockets.
Now it is proposing to go forth with an emphasis on enriching (anyone but a white man), to “build” this next leg of public transportation?
Not only is this inefficient, but how can it be legal?