Grandpa, I believe that the 9.5 cents will put us at the top (or very near it) for Gas Tax rate. However, it is important to remember that we have:

NO Income Tax
NO Toll roads
NO Private roads

That is one of the reasons for my criticism of the reasons on the nonewgastax web site. It states facts that are typical political lies - true on the face of them, but clearly do not tell the whole story.

Building roads in Washington is quite expensive - and it should be. Environmental protection of the streams that carry our anadromous fish is important to me and I would expect important to most who peruse this site.

WSDOT is using a variety of different methods to lower the cost or increase the efficiency of building roads in this State. I work with folks from the Dept every day - while some appear to be feeding at the public trough, most put in more than a full days work - day in and day out.

Dan S. - you said "
quote:
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The mere idea of just giving a multi-billion dollar blank check over to the the lovers of bigger government without so much as a definative plan or proposal as to how it would be spent
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Sincerely,

The Missing Billions in Iraq


Face it, Rory..........you're being bent over by more than one party. But you're thanking one of them for doing it."

Well said, it will be interesting what Rory's spin machine instructs him to reply or if he will just ignore it like he did a post of mine pointing out some errors he made in analysing the Election Contest. We shall see....

Ed do you ever see the way unions work in the DOT? I asked once about why there were 10 guys at a project with 2 working and 8 standing around. The answer was typical of why we waste so much money. I was told that there are union requirements which say that employee #1 must be on the job and he has only one small part in it...like throwing a switch...so he gets to stand around until it is his turn...Combine this with the prevailing wage requirement and you have just doubled the cost of most functions.

Prevailing wages in my field are 3 times what the going rate is with the exception of the union workers. The union folks in my field can go from apprentice to journeyman by simply paying higher dues. No requirement to make the higher pay translate into higher quality of work or more work in an 8 hour day. Not so for others I deal with like carpenters. I'll take a union journeyman carpenter everyday over an independent. I don't mind paying their $33 an hour because I get it back in quality and production. I don't see that at DOT. I see a good ole boy network of make work projects.

I agree to a point that impact studies are important to protect the resources, but aren't those same studies part of the problem at times? It seems that some projects are studied to death, all the while the cost of completing the project is going up before it's even started. Ergo, cost overruns.

Harley, fair point - however, there are always a few sides to every story. One of the problems DOT faces (really every Govt. agency) when they do a typical Design/Bid/Build job is the following. Because a lot of Contractors bid a job at a very low profit margin, they sometimes look to change order their way to a profit position. Because of that, DOT feels a need to dot every i and cross every t twice. The biggest cause of change orders is incomplete design specs and unforseen conditions. It's a real Catch -22, the State usually has between a 7 and 10% contingency fund. If they put a project on the fast track, change orders are likely to gobble up the contingency. If they do everything to insure no claims, the delays gobble up the contingency. One way around this is to do Design/Build. Here a great deal of the risk is transferred from the DOT to the Contractor. Naturally enough, this is the most expensive and fastest way to build. The days of a 520 bridge going from design to completion in 2 to 3 years is long gone. There are too many differing power groups that have their own ax to grind to allow that to happen. DOT gets the blame - sometimes deserved, most often (IMHO) not.

So it's the private contractor who bids these jobs trying to get every penny they can out of the tax payer that's the root of it all?

Yeah, I know that's simplistic, but fun.