Well the answer is, “Maybe,” as long as certain legitimate participants are excluded. From what Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt said recently, he’s reluctant to participate if certain politicians are involved, specifically 18th District State Rep. Liz Pike. Leavitt was fully exposed after his election in 2009, as a deal-making, ‘fluid’ politician. The defunct CRC bridge project provided ample opportunities for graft and corruption. And Leavitt was quite comfortable in this light. However he took serious heat for his self-centered deal making and, like nearly all such politicians, he’ll seek to punish his political enemies.
The local old media (Columbian) echoed Leavitt’s self-serving and immature point of view in an editorial on Feb. 16th. Both effectively said that since Liz Pike disagreed with them before, and is friends of conservatives they hate, then she has no role in the process to study new regional interstate traffic throughput.
As a Washington state legislator, Liz Pike certainly has an obligation to participate because (1) her constituents are affected by the regional interstate bridge system, and (2) the Washington state legislature has a key role in funding such projects. Therefor she’s taken the responsibility to attempt to put in place improved structure to even begin discussing these matters. She wisely reached out the 49th district legislator Sharon Wiley to collaborate on the details of this proposed structure. Rep. Wiley is to be thanked for her efforts to be objective and reasonable, instead of playing pure partisan politics like Leavitt and the local old media. We all know Rep. Wiley took significant heat from her highly partisan Democrat friends.
Wiley and Pike produced a structure for starting discussions and planning (in House Bill 2414) that unanimously passed the house transportation committee. The history of this bill was explained in a prior ClarkCounty.info article. However the bill was stopped as the Washington state house did not pass it through. ClarkCounty.info is aware that the bill’s prime-sponsor, Rep. Sharon Wiley, was heavily lobbied by certain self-interested politicians, a paid lobbyist, and Vancouver establishment representatives to stop her support of the bill. These people’s intervention was pure politics and fully counter to the best interests of the citizens—and more will be exposed with these typical self-interested political operatives in future articles on this matter. Again, we at ClarkCounty.info thank and praise Representatives Wiley and Pike for their attempt to create necessary structure to mitigate the influence of unbounded incompetence, corruption, and righteous ideologues who took over the old CRC bridge project.
ClarkCounty.info has put much thought and effort into how to educate citizens and politicians about transportation options to improve regional throughput on our interstate freeways (currently I-5 and I-205). We have recruited five individuals with transportation and/or public works construction project experience. This team will be identifying and scoring the various options to improve throughput. This will be done in in our Columbia River Bridge Options matrix.