For the next election, I will no longer support Kathy Lambert as our representative for King County Council District 3! As a driver for Metro, I can no longer support her spearheading the assault on Metro and other King County employees livelihood! I am also considering canceling my subscription to the Seattle Sunday Times as they seem to have a recent passion for bashing County employees also! Most of this unfair reporting and heavy-handedness stems from a report from the Washington Policy Center and a recent audit of Metro operations! The knee jerk reactions from Lambert and other Council members show me they cannot think outside of the box and come up with more realistic solutions to the County budget problems! Let’s see……the County Council members along with Mr. Constantine decide to spend down Metros reserves on other crisis issues against the advice of Metro Managers! Then comes the schedule adjustments in a reaction of the audit saying there is too much layover time for the buses in an effort to save money. The new schedules are not even drivable now and in my opinion, unsafe! This has eroded Metro’s on time performance with many routes running constantly late! The drivers are getting very little break time and are being heavily stressed! This ridiculous policy will eventually cost the County way more in any money saved in L&I claims, medical and insurance payouts, accidents and possible law suits caused by these impossible schedules! Now comes the assault on County employees pay and benefits. I still cannot understand the corporate and political attack on living wage jobs in this country! The United States has gone from a producing to a consuming country! In order to continue in this consumption economy, the populace have to have the means to spend, therefore consume. When living wage jobs are outsourced and eliminated, this reduces the means to keep up with consumption rate needed to sustain the “new economy” and it falls like a house of cards! One doesn’t need a degree in Economics to understand this! Apparently most of our politicians don’t get it or are forced to ignore it! Now we come to how Metro is mainly funded and that is by sales taxes! By this all out attack on thousands of workers whom all spend money in the County, aren’t you just pulling the rug right out from under the County budget? It would seem so to me and there by exasperating the budget crisis!
I implore those of you reading this to also read page 4 of the following article linked here to get a reality check of what really is going on with our dilemma as County employees and then make a better educated decision on who to throw your support. Also feel free to check out some of the other articles written to find out just who is this Washington Policy Center really is!
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