Education spending has been cut 11.3 percent; public safety and economic-development programs have been cut 7.3 percent; spending on health and the environment has been cut 9.3 percent; and economic-security programs have been cut 9.7 percent.

Budget cuts of this depth and breadth represent a sharp reduction in our investment in the future of our state. They have resulted in the loss of affordable quality health insurance for over 44,000 people, reduced access to higher education, a dramatic decrease in natural resource protection, the loss of needed financial assistance for people who are unemployed because of a disability, and more.

The cuts have not been equal across the board. Overall, the areas that will be cut the most include programs that cultivate opportunities for higher education (down 17.3 percent); programs to promote sustainability like the Department of Fish and Wildlife (down 33.4 percent); and programs that protect public health and the environment like funding for the HPV vaccine and substance-abuse programs (down 23 percent).

The report concludes, “The outlook for the next biennium is bleak because economic woes will continue to hold back revenue growth. According to the most recent forecast, current revenue expectations will be $3 billion short of the amount needed to continue our current commitments.”

Read the whole report here.

Now comes our final question. There hasn’t been a decade since the 1970s (when even Fresca commercials were political) in which everything was so culturally and politically charged. A decade that began with a contested presidential election and the calamitous 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and D.C. gave way to historic headline after historic headline (and not in a good way): Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, domestic surveillance, deficits; Katrina; and the Wall Street fiasco.

It all ended with a formal rejection of President Bush’s divisive politics (thanks for that, Ken Mehlman) and the historic Obama election—and all of this against the blinking background of the new app age.

Just whoa. If you had gone to sleep in 1966 and woken up in 1999, you wouldn’t have been too shocked (OK, maybe Crystal Pepsi would have startled you). Woken up in 2009? You’d be dumbfounded. It was a jump cut decade.

This week’s essay: Name a tectonic-plate-shifting song (musically speaking) that matched the historic decade, and explain why it was inspired by the tumultuous times.

Send essays to Wes@publicola.net—be sure to put “Bumbershoot contest” in the subject line.

Full Bumbershoot schedule here.  Full Festival details here.

Go.

Nonetheless, Murray’s knack for scoring earmarks—she ranked 9th last year—has been Rossi’s metaphor for her out-of-control spending.

However, his critique just got a bit trickier.

Last month, Dino Rossi’s campaign reportedly called Sen. Patty Murray’s record of spending money on veterans “reckless.” The Murray campaign pounced, and Rossi’s campaign quickly clarified, saying they meant reckless government spending “in general” would endanger “worthy” spending programs like the VA.

“When servicemen and women leave active duty, they need to know they can find a job,” Rossi said in a press release last week. “They need to that their kids and grandkids won’t be burdened by this massive debt. … Senator Murray has put this in jeopardy as well.”

But guess where Murray’s VA spending shows up.

This year, Murray secured nearly $1,000,000 (in earmarks) for two housing and service centers geared toward homeless Washington veterans and their families, according to OpenSecrets.org.

In addition, Murray’s campaign office says she has made four veterans-related funding requests for 2011, which would total up to $1,375,000. These projects include a veterans’ employment service center, job training programs for female veterans, computers for veterans’ employment services, and community voicemail for homeless vets.

We have a call in to Rossi’s campaign asking them if they still believe Murray’s knack for getting targeted earmarks into the budget is a bad thing.

Asked point blank by Erica yesterday if there was any truth to the rumor, McGinn laughed and said, “I am focused now on doing the best job I can in the time I have. The office belongs to the city, not to any one person.”

2. Incumbent U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen (D-2, Northwest Washington) who finished in second place against Tea Party favorite John Koster in the primary—losing 42.18 to 42.02—picked up an endorsement from Diana McGinnes, one of two Democrats who challenged Larsen from the left in the primary.

McGinnes, a fraud investigator, finished with 6.01 percent of the primary vote. Another progressive who took on Larsen in the primary, Larry Kalb, g0t 4.35 percent of the vote and a Republican, John Carmack, got 4.35.

McGinnes’ endorsement statement is here. And here’s an excerpt:

Today, however, we must get behind Rick Larsen to re-elect him. Rick is not what we want him to be and he will not vote the way we want him to vote on many issues, but he will vote on many issues that are important to us. Above all else, we must retain control of the House and Senate. Not a single Democratic bill will see the light of day for the next two years–probably longer–if that control is lost. We simply do not have the luxury of being purists. There are too many who still need help – even it if is watered down help in the attempt to get the votes needed to pass a bill.

3. Long-shot King County Council candidate Diana Toledo hasn’t racked up the kind of establishment endorsements that her opponent, state Sen. Joe McDermott, has amassed, but she does have one solid constituency: Animal-welfare activists, several of whom make an appearance on her endorsements list.

Yesterday’s addition: Serenity Equine Rescue, a horse-welfare organization, called Toledo a “true friend to the animals” in a glowing endorsement letter. Before she was laid off due to county budget cuts, Toledo headed up the county’s animal cruelty investigations program.

4. David Flaherty, CEO of the polling firm Magellan Strategies, confirms that Magellan has been doing polling in the Seattle area for a “private client,” but declined to share any further information about who that client might be.

Fizz’s best (if obvious) guess: Dino Rossi. A PubliCola reader reports the survey asked about the Rossi-Murray Senate race, along with topics like health-care reform, immigration, and “job-killing” cap and trade.

5. City ethics and elections commission director Wayne Barnett prevailed yesterday afternoon in his case against municipal court judge candidate Ed McKenna, who wanted to refer to his opponent, incumbent judge Edsonya Charles, in his voters’ guide statement.

In a 6-0 vote, the commission upheld Barnett’s decision to deny McKenna’s appeal, prohibiting McKenna from referencing Charles’ low King County Bar Association ranking.

2) A belated post: The Spokesman-Review has some analysis of the storm brewing over mailing ballots overseas. In short: FOX News should have done their research before blasting Washington State for squelching the overseas military vote.

3) More hard-hitting election analysis from the Spokesman-Review: Bozo beats Jesus in statewide election returns.

4) As Erica reported earlier today, Mayor Mike McGinn debunked some inaccurate (and alarmist) figures about pot arrests from The Stranger. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, who broke the story yesterday over at Seattlecrime.com, has a gleeful followup.

The story of John T. Williams, the man who was killed by SPD officer Ian D. Birk keeps getting more depressing.

Today’s winner:  Republicans.

Their numbers are growing.

Bonus winner: Bozo the Clown.

The city’s budget office will have to “revise the [city's] revenue estimates downward” for next year, Mayor Mike McGinn said this morning. Currently, the city estimates a $56 million budget shortfall for 2011. However, both the state and the county recently revised their own revenue forecasts due to the ongoing recession and delayed economic recovery.

“It’s a very volatile situation right now,” McGinn said. “Because of that volatility, we are taking a real close look at that revenue forecast and it will be lower.”

Asked whether he had given further thought to city union employees’ demands that he cut managers’ and strategic advisors’ salaries before reducing their cost-of-living raises next year, McGinn said, “It’s not either/or; it’s all of the above.” He did say he expects that an executive order he issued just after he came into office, requiring all city departments to get mayoral permission before hiring contractors, will “have a chilling effect on the number of contracts,” potentially saving the city money.

McGinn also fielded a question about what effect the many initiatives on the ballot this year could have on the city budget.

While the city would lose about $3 million if the liquor-privatization and candy-tax repeal measures pass, McGinn said, the city would benefit if voters pass a proposed sales-tax increase in King County. That measure, which splits the proceeds between the county and its cities, would bring the city an estimated $12 million a year, of which one third would have to be spent on public safety.

McGinn said he plans to propose new revenue sources, “including new fees and charges” for city services, as part of his budget proposal to the council. McGinn will release that proposal in about three weeks.

Mayor Mike McGinn confirmed yesterday that the Seattle Police Department is not—contrary to a recent story in The Stranger—arresting people for marijuana possession, absent any other charge, at an “astronomically higher rate” than in the past.

The paper claimed that 147 people were “arrested” this year for pot possession alone, absent any other violation.

In reality, only six people in the first four months of this year year were even cited (as opposed to arrested) for pot alone, and those incidents “all involved individuals openly smoking marijuana in front of a police officer,” according to an FAQ compiled by the mayor’s office. The rest were stopped for separate offenses such as outstanding warrants (which wouldn’t spur an additional citation) and traffic violations (which aren’t criminal offenses).

Moreover, according to information the city attorney’s office sent PubliColaof the larger group of individuals who were cited for pot and another offense, only seven were actually arrested during those four months—again, contrary to the Stranger’s claim that “Seattle police are arresting more people on low-level marijuana charges this year than any year in the last decade.”

Additionally, city attorney Pete Holmes’ office has not pursued a single pot-only case this year, and has dropped all charges in all but one incident (that incident involved three separate charges.)

As Seattlecrime.com reported earlier this week, the Stranger‘s erroneous numbers were apparently based on a misunderstanding of the Seattle Police Department’s new reporting system, which automates case referrals, so that, for example, if police pick someone up for an outstanding warrant and find marijuana in their pocket, they’ll automatically refer the pot case as well. City attorney Pete Holmes has said he will not prosecute pot possession in such cases.

“What we know about marijuana is that, by law, it’s the lowest law enforcement priority of the Seattle Police Department,” McGinn said in response to PubliCola’s question. “One of the things to understand is that we have a reporting system… and there’s been a change in how [cases are] filed. Simple reporting may show an uptick … but that doesn’t mean the person got arrested for it. If they find marijuana, they are bound to report it.”

However, McGinn added, “I don’t believe we are seeing more arrests. I think police are taking seriously the fact that it’s the lowest law enforcement priority. That said, it is still against the law.”

McGinn concluded: “You’d do everyone a favor if you don’t light up in front of a police officer.”

UPDATE: According to a fact sheet put together by McGinn’s office, police officers “rarely” cite people solely for marijuana posession.

Although it may appear that marijuana was the “sole charge” in a lot of incident reports, it often looks that way because the reason for the stop was either a traffic citation (which isn’t a criminal charge), or to execute a warrant. If someone is arrested because of an outstanding warrant, the offense for which the warrant was issued isn’t a new violation, so review of the City Attorney’s records would cause one to conclude (incorrectly) that marijuana was the only criminal violation at issue.

Officers are obligated to report every incident completely and correctly—including incidents in which they find pot on someone cited for a separate violation—and they have no discretion in deciding whether to refer a case for prosecution.

The spin: Rossi came out against Wall Street reform after Wall Street lobbyists feted him with a fundraiser and Rossi opposed killing a corporate tax break to fund teachers and Medicaid—which Pelz linked to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce fundraiser for Rossi. (The Chamber opposed the bill, which brought $500 million to Washington State, too.)

Also in Pelz’s Rossi recap: The former state senator’s business deal (while he was a state senator) with registered Building Industry Association of Washington Olympia lobbyists, David Ducharme and Richard Ducharme. Rossi, who also put up $10,000 for a bank that the Ducharme’s co-invested in, bought an apartment building with the pair.

However, the reporters on the call, myself included, were uniformly skeptical of Pelz’s general theme. For example, I wanted to know if Rossi had actually ushered through any legislation that related to his deal with the Ducharmes. Others wanted to know why Sen. Murray wasn’t guilty of the same type of politics as usual Pelz was accusing Rossi of, pointing out that her top contributors are lobbyists and her former chief of staff Rick Desimone has lobbied for Boeing, one of Murray’s top contributors ($74,000 this cycle, including $10,000 from Boeing’s PAC).  Murray has continually gone to bat for Boeing on the tanker deal.

Pelz didn’t have a response to my question, but he did point out that Rossi voted with the BIAW 99 percent of the time.

I’ll give Pelz the quote of the day, though. His rejoinder on the Murray-Boeing relationship: “The Boeing company didn’t just cause a Depression in America,” he said referring to Rossi’s position on Wall Street reform.

McGinn said the city made “a conscious decision to not provide all officers with Tasers, but to provide them to officers with a certain level of experience and training.” He said police chief John Diaz told him that other cities that have provided all officers with Tasers had seen problems with excessive use of force; just yesterday, a man died in Spanaway after being Tasered by police.

At a press conference yesterday afternoon, Chief Diaz said the police department has questions about Birk’s initial account of the shooting, including his claim that Williams advanced toward him with a knife. McGinn said he did not know whether the case had been referred to the department’s Office of Professional Accountability yet.

McGinn said that despite several high-profile instances of police violence in recent months, he still believes “Chief Diaz is the right man for the job.”

Our take: Hoyer is worried about apathetic Democratic voters facing off against fired up Republicans, but his GOTV pitch wasn’t incredibly compelling. (Re: the Great Recession: “We have not yet had succes” but the Republicans caused this mess.) Um. Okay.

However, we were pretty bowled over by Heck.

Here’s some video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We were testing out the idea of a regular gathering where Cola readers could get together and wonk out. Mission accomplished on the wonkery metric as 30 or so Cola heads took over one half of the bar and argued about the Cross Base Highway, road diets, land use taxes, panhandling (City Council Member Tim Burgesss showed up), I-1098, and health care reform.

We’re definitely doing this again.

And thanks Five Point for hosting.

[Editor's note: Dan Bertolet, AKA HugeassCity, returns from summer vacation with a bang. Here, he comes out swinging against expanding car capacity. Welcome back, Dan!]

Supporters of “road diets” are quick to point out that even when car travel lanes are eliminated to make room for bikes, not to worry, there will still be sufficient capacity for cars. And even though that has been blindingly indisputable in several recent Seattle cases, the naysayers howled away nonetheless—a sad commentary on how deeply in denial our culture still is when it comes to the problem of car dependence.

But to me, the dynamic of that debate also reveals a troubling acquiescence—by both sides—to an ostensibly inviolable ground rule: Car capacity is sacred.

It may well be that in today’s political climate, the only way cycling and pedestrian advocates will get the infrastructure they want is if they assure the masses that car travel will not be impacted in any way. But the trouble is, that position suppresses the reality that cars are in fundamental conflict with walking, biking, and transit.

In his book Green Metropolis, David Owen captures that conflict:

In urban areas that are dense enough to support efficient public transit systems, officials often negate their own efforts to increase usage, by simultaneously spending huge sums to make it easier for people to get around in cars. When a city’s streets or highways become crowded, for example, the standard response is to create additional capacity by building new roads or widening existing ones. Projects like these almost always end up making the original problem worse—while also usually taking years to complete and costing many millions of dollars—because they generate what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new open roadway encourages existing users to make more car trips, lures drivers away from other routes, and tempts transit riders to return to their automobiles, with the eventual result that the new roads become at least as clogged as the old roads, though at higher traffic volumes, and the efficiency of transit declines. These negative outcomes are compounded by the fact that, in the short term, temporarily improved traffic flow reduces commute times for drivers on the expanded roadways, making it easier for people to justify building houses, malls, and office buildings in formerly inaccessible outlying areas—and , in turn, eventually makes all the original problems worse, as the places where commuters sleep and shop drift farther and farther apart, and new feeder roads are built to serve them.

Note that the passage above is just as valid if you substitute “walking” or “biking” for “transit.”

The crucial point is that car infrastructure not only encourages driving, it also sabotages mobility by any other means. It’s a vicious cycle: roads beget sprawl begets car dependence begets roads, and so on. And the result is an ever-expanding built environment in which walking, biking, and transit are not viable options.

The only way to break the vicious cycle is to invest our limited transportation dollars in infrastructure that will help make walking, biking, and transit more attractive than driving. And here’s where we need to start being honest with ourselves: If we are serious about creating a city in which significant numbers of trips are made by modes other than cars, then we will have to accept that driving will become less convenient than it is today.

As the Puget Sound region continues to grow—and we know it will—we will be faced with a choice: Continue to build more roads and thereby preclude progress on alternative transportation, or stop building roads and accept that there is a limit to the number of cars we can accommodate if we hope to a create a balanced, sustainable transportation system and the compact land use patterns that support it.

All the evidence I’ve seen overwhelmingly supports the latter choice. That is not to say the transition will be totally painless. It won’t. But wishing for a pony isn’t going to solve the massive future challenges we face. And the alternative is to keep spending our money to make our problems worse, dig our hole deeper, and compound the long-term misery.

We can’t have it both ways. There can be no meaningful progress on alternative transportation until we stop acting as if car capacity is sacred. Rising energy costs and cultural evolution can both be expected to help move us in that direction eventually. And both local and state policies have established the goal of reducing driving.

But so far, the only truly effective means we have to reduce reliance on cars—curtailing capacity—is still a political non-starter. And that attitude needs to change fast. Because the effects of transportation infrastructure investments play out at the regional scale over decades-long timeframes.  The time to starting breaking the vicious cycle is now.

Hoyer spoke to a labor crowd at the Labor Temple in Belltown and summed up what’s at issue for Democrats in the upcoming election: “Apathy is the biggest adversary in this election,” he told the crowd, noting that “right wingers are really on fire” and that he was “worried about our people … I’m worried about our people not being fired up. Not seeing the consequences of their apathy.”

Mimicking the root of Democratic apathy, he said: “‘Geez, we haven’t done enough.’”

His rejoinder?

“We elected a new president and expected that new president to flip a switch and everything would be fine. And it’s not, and it’s not going to be fine for a little bit of time to come,” he said, “but we are making progress. We have not yet had success, but we’re making progress.”

Almost two years into the “Yes, We Can” presidency, it’s a candid message, but not exactly one that reverses apathy.

DelBene and Heck also addressed the crowd. DelBene is not the cure for the apathy gap. She called out Reichert’s no votes on financial reform and health care reform, and against benefits for police and fire fighters (which she called “egregious”), but didn’t stir the crowd until she said she was for the “Employee Free Choice Act”—a labor bill that allows workers to unionize without a bruising election if they can get 50 percent sign off.

Heck, a former state legislator and the founder of TVW, was a different story. Morning Fizz had never seen Heck speak before and pow!

Coming from a district, Clark County, where unemployment is 13.3 percent (“if Clark County was a state it would have the second highest unemployment rate in the nation,” he boomed) he said creating jobs “is the civil rights issue of our times.”

He cited all sorts of dour economic stats—no net increase in jobs for the first decade in 70 years—going on to say, “this is not an abstraction or a bar graph or a pie chart, it’s real men and women and families losing jobs and homes and health care.”

2. On the GOP side, U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) was in town fundraising for Dino Rossi. Brown is a bit of an odd cheerleader for Rossi given that he gave the Democrats the key 60th vote they needed to pass Wall Street reform: “It includes safeguards to help prevent another financial meltdown, ensures that consumers are protected, and it is paid for without new taxes,” Brown said in signing off on the bill.

Rossi wants to repeal the bill.

3. At yesterday’s Seattle Police Department press conference on the August 30 fatal police shooting at Boren and Howell, in which an officer fired four rounds at a man who refused to drop a knife (the patrol officer had stopped and gotten out of his car when he witnessed the 50-year-old man whittling a board with the blade), Morning Fizz asked Chief Diaz if the Seattle Police Department has heeded a memo earlier this year calling for Diaz to emphasize de-escalation techniques.

Diaz said that SPD already uses de-escalation training, and that it didn’t necessarily apply in this case. “It becomes much more dicey when you have a situation with a potentially lethal weapon.”

4. Are corporate logos coming to the Seattle skyline? The PI reports. (Whoops, just realized we wrote about this, a bit less sensationally, in July.)

Erica wrote about the polling numbers earlier today, but to recap: A plurality of Democrats (41 percent) support Eyman’s I-1053, which would reinstate the two-thirds legislative majority rule for raising taxes. (29 percent of Democrats say they’re opposed to the measure and 30 percent are undecided.)

With that kind of Democratic support, the measure is polling  55 percent ‘Yes’ overall.

Today’s loser, according to the gang at Nerd Hour here at the Five Point, the Democrats.

Says one nerd, not only are they going along with Eyman, but today’s Gallup poll is pretty daunting.

*Another Nerd suggests President Obama is today’s loser. “He’s got a speech about the one campaign promise he kept and no one’s  paying attention.”