Cascadia today: Sound Transit short $35 billion + Feucht's fuckery flops + Seattle city council sock puppets

Hope you all got some rest on Labor Day. It feels like fall is on the way, with cloudy skies and a backlog of work and news in my inbox as summer winds down. Thanks to my paid subscribers for helping make this newsletter possible. So, without further ado, here's the latest new from across the bioregion.

OR tackles transpo budget & Sound Transit faces shortfall

The Oregon House narrowly approved governor Tina Kotek's proposed increase in the gas tax and other revenue sources to fund a $4.3 billion in road and public transit improvements., OPB reports. The bill passed 36-12, meeting the bare minimum required in the legislature for measures that raise taxes. It now moves on to Senate. Meanwhile, in Washington, Sound Transit, the three-county agency working to expand light rail service in the region, said last week that its long-term estimates were short $35 billion. The surge in costs, bringing the 30-year expansion efforts to $185 billion, was due to increased construction and labor costs. Meanwhile, Seattle's department of transportation has ruled out adding new bus lanes to improve the city's perennially late route 8, know to residents as the L8 (pronounced "late").

Feucht's fuckery flops

Sean Feucht, the right-wing Christian singer and activist hoping to inspire a terrifying ANTIFA™ reaction to his anti-LGBTQ message of hate at a rally in Seattle over the weekend fizzled out as his sparsely attended concert was met by a chorus of kazoo-playing queers. The Stranger has more on the antics at Gas Works park. Meanwhile, in generally conservative Okanogan county in north central Washington, residents are organizing protests against Trump's immigration policies and cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, Cascade PBS reports.

BC public service workers set to strike

CBC reports that some 34,000 public service workers in Victoria, metro Vancouver, and Prince George are ready to set up picket lines and strike after negotiations with the British Columbia government fell apart. In related news, the Oregonian reports that 1 in 6 Oregon workers belong to a union, a rate significantly higher than the 10 percent rate of unionization for all the US. Washington has a similar rate as Oregon, at 16 percent.

Company polluted an Oregon town's water and regulators failed to stop it

Investigate West has a detailed investigation into how a Canadian-based wood products company released stormwater tainted with cancer-causing chemicals into the water source for Sheridan, a town west of Portland. The company, Stella Jones, failed to keep stormwater containing the wood preservative pentachlorophenol from entering the south Yamhill River – and Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality failed numerous times to enforce regulations that could have prevented the spills.

The story behind Seattle City Council sock puppets

PubliCola scored an exclusive interview with the anonymous creator of the Seattle City Council sock puppet show, which has been brilliantly skewering council member antics in brief YouTube videos. The skits use council members' actual recorded voices and some extremely simple but clever puppet renditions of the disfunctional and weird members of the council.

The thing about puppets that’s amazing as an art form is, it takes so little to turn an inanimate object into something animate. You just put some googly eyes on a sock and it suddenly has a personality.

Yes, Sara, please take some time to think about this.

--Andrew Engelson