March 9, 2006

SHORT TAKES

A look-see at loopholes

If at first you don’t succeed, you can always try again.

That’s what state Rep. Jim McIntire, D-Seattle, did in this year’s legislature. In 2005, a bill McIntire put forward to conduct regular audits of corporate tax breaks that the state has given out over the years failed to pass. But, this year, the measure made it through both the House and Senate.

House Bill 1069 creates a citizen commission that will set a yearly schedule for looking at corporate and other tax preferences, with each tax break to be eyeballed at least every 10 years to see if it provided the business or jobs promised. The House Finance and the Senate Ways and Means committees are then obligated to hold public hearings on the recommendations.

David Rolf, president of Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union, which backed the bill, says it’s a start, but there’s more to be done.

It’s “an important first step towards ensuring real accountabity for the billions of dollars spent every year on tax loopholes,” Rolf says. But, in the future, SEIU will push for legislation “to ensure full public disclosure of tax loopholes and to require the governor to submit a tax expenditure report.”

Occidental takes fall

A city contractor cut down 17 sycamores at Occidental Park Monday, piling up the logs and backhoeing out the stumps — all while a lawsuit to save the trees is still pending in Superior Court.

“ It’s good [the trees] are coming down,” said Rich Reel, a business owner passing the site Monday. “More people will use the park.”

Gallery owner Bif Brigman, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, disagrees. Brigman, who says he and his fellow plaintiffs may drop their lawsuit now, calls it social cleansing of poor people who use the park.

Brigman says the city is creating an extra-wide sidewalk suitable only for hosing— a design, he says, Mayor Greg Nickels forced on Pioneer Square over the majority consensus of citizens who took part in the planning.

“If some crackpot mayor gets to do whatever he and his friends want, I’m not sure I want to live in that kind of city,” Brigman says.

“ If they’re so willing to take away the citizen’s voice, it makes me question the [mayor’s plans for the] viaduct and height and density variables. It makes me suspect everything they’re doing as shady.”

Seattle, he says, used to be a town where people came together to make decisions. “Now,” Brigman adds, “it’s just the haves raping and pillaging and the have-nots are just getting crushed.”

— Cydney Gillis