Highway tolling has won the support of the state Transportation Commission, which I have been promoting for years, with special attention to the mountain passes. Why should users of a marine highway, the ferries, be forced to pay, while drivers using passes cut through mountains to shorten the driving distance between both sides of the state and maintained in severe weather, get a free ride?
How receptive the Legislature will be is another matter but it certainly is not in the cards to jack up the gasoline tax. As I recall, we still have a couple more raises on the books due to kick in over the next few years.
Gov. Christine Gregoire has indicated that construction of the new viaduct or tunnel or whatever in Seattle should be paid through tolls by the users rather than taxing everybody in the state but that doesnt mean she wont change her mind before push comes to shove.
She promised not to raise taxes when she was elected, too.
What we ought to be doing is putting tolls on all our bridges. In fact, they never should have come off when the bridges were paid for but left on to fund the maintenance and operation of them.
Not good news is the discovery on the bottom of Hood Canal of mats of marine bacteria in an ecological dead zone, which is blamed for the deaths of many fish.
For years, Mayor Glenn Jarstad of Bremerton, who fished sports, commercial and charter boat, has warned that Hood Canal and parts of the Sound are being turned into a Dead Sea by actions and non-action of state fisheries and fisheries interests.
Taking of sea urchins, sea cucumbers, geoducks and vast amounts of bottom fish was altering the undersea environment, he said. Draggers were tearing up eel grass beds. Kelp beds, which once stretched in front of my house on Admiralty Inlet from Foulweather Bluff to Hansville, are gone.
And now they wonder whats wrong with the canal. Ive written extensively about another action of Fisheries in switching the rivers that empty into Hood Canal from spawning grounds for silver and king salmon to chum salmon in an effort (in vain) to get the Indian tribes to localize there and leave the Sound for other fisheries. The tribes only take the roe from the chums and sell it to Asians who consider it a delicacy.
Lastly, I warned you that as the Nov. 7 election neared, the foes of Initiative 933 are going to drag out the old arguments against it when it was Referendum 48, claiming it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Dont pay any attention to them. It doesnt have to cost anything. It says that if city, county or state government wants to make or prohibit some use of your land that lessens its value or your use of it, it has to assess the cost first, then pay you up front or back off.
The foes, in a 9-24 story in the Seattle Times, have a fantasy by Edmonds city planner Joseph Tovar who envisions you looking out your window in 2007 and seeing a bulldozer coming in to start a new strip mall after removing every tree, filling in every creek and paving a parking lot up to your property line.
When you complain, the interlopers explain its all because of I-933, which Tovar says will cost every tax-paying household in the state $3,000 or more. If government has to pay, it has to get the money somewhere, but if they havent got it, they cant do it. And if they have to get it, they have to ask the taxpayers for it, who dont have to go along.
Dont let government usurp your right to determine the use of your land.

Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA, 98349.