The sun has just started its daily heating duties and already that overactive nuclear reactor has my zone of Texas heated to 86 degrees. This seems to bode ill for yet one more super HOT day in Texas.
Changing the subject from the temperature to democracy in America.
Something occurred yesterday in Seattle, a democratic city in the democratic part of America, that can not occur in Fort Worth, which is not much of a democratic city in a democratic part of America.
Some Seattle citizens collected enough signatures on a petition to put a referendum on a ballot, forcing a public vote on a public issue.
In Seattle the issue was the replacement with a tunnel of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Viaduct replacement is a multi-billion dollar project.
The Seattle Viaduct replacement project had already been approved prior to yesterday's vote. But the Seattle mayor opposed the tunnel.
Yesterday, Seattle voters, in Referendum 1, overwhelmingly voted to support the tunnel project, which had Seattle's mayor saying, "I worked to give the public a direct vote on the tunnel. The public said move ahead with the tunnel, and that's what we're going to do."
Meanwhile in Fort Worth there has never been a public vote on the almost $1 billion public works project that is known as the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle.
Why is it that, apparently, the citizens of Fort Worth don't understand that they have a democratic right to vote on projects like the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle? By vote, I mean a real vote, a straight up referendum or initiative on a ballot.
It is very perplexing.
1 comment:
Interesting. Seattle elected a mayor who ran opposing a project, yet this is not seen as a vote against the project. In Fort Worth officials will actually tell you that the Trinity Project has been voted on several times by the public, when the public has voted to elect a person in favor of the Trinity Project. I guess the Fort Worth Way of voting on a public works project doesn't work in Seattle. And for some reason the Seattle method of having the public vote on a public works project is not the Fort Worth Way.
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