Wow, Port Angeles’ city streets need repair, said the Port Angeles City Council at its April 4 meeting, and by ordaining formation of a Transportation Benefit District, a 0.2 percent increase in our local sales tax come January 2018 is being proposed.
So, now I guess the question needs to be asked: Why now, as in all of a sudden?
Have our city street caretakers just noticed that some streets and alleys are in deplorable condition and have been for many years now?
Where have they been driving around town lately? In la-la-land, or only in the recently repaired City Hall parking lot?
Why hasn’t the city street department been keeping up on regular daily street maintenance?
Surely not because insurance on the daily parked vehicles — and I count an average of 11 extra city vehicles parked daily in the City Hall parking lot — is sucking up those needed dollars for our streets and alleys needing long-overdue maintenance and even some obvious replacement areas?
And now for this total surprise — golly, what happened? — they will seek a boost in [sales] taxes to do an overhaul of road repairs, for lack of “preventive maintenance” from way too many years back.
So, in objective support of a local Transportation Benefit District as is being proposed in a voting measure for the upcoming Aug. 1 primary election, I also need to add this:
As the now-new resident in our country’s White House would say, city street maintenance management, “yer fired!”
Paul Lamoureux,
Port Angeles