On the complaint letters about Electric City

Well, did the people writing to the paper about the tax complaining check why the city council is considering passing the tax? Or just jump on the band wagon complaining.

Well, if you want to complain, why you don't blame the people that elected the Democrat House and Senate in Washington State? They are the ones that passed the law for Counties and Cities to collect the tax. Electric City has not passed the tax yet, but if they don't the tabs will still go up the $20 no matter where you live but the county will get the money not the city.

When the licenses went to $30 several years ago the cities lost a lot of revenue for city streets. This law was passed to help the cities recover some of the lost revenue from before.

Regarding the Water Treatment for arsenic, the city had no choice because of the Environmental Protection Agency new rules on water arsenic, the new regulations put in place by the EPA in 2001 that changed the rules from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. The only choice would be for all the cities to ban together and tell the EPA they would not comply. Then what do you think would happen? There is no way all the cities would ban together.

You complain about the new city ordinances. Before Mayor Halsey passed away, the city was ordered to bring their codes up to state law codes. Most of the city codes were not updated from late 60s & 70s. So the planning commission and city council were forced to update quick because we had a deadline. They used boilerplate codes from other cities just to comply, now the task is to conform those codes to fit with the city of Electric City.

I know it is easy to write letters to the paper and complain, but do you ever check and try to find out why the changes? These council members work long hours for no pay because they like where they live and want to pay back to the community they love. Most of what they do they have no choice because of the regulations coming from Washington state laws and U.S. laws.

If you don't like all the regulations, then you should think about voting different people into political office that don't think their job is to pass more control over the citizens. Write the letters to the US & Washington state congressmen.

Carl Russell