Daily Score Blog

For whom the road tolls:

Drivers who cross the Highway 520 floating bridge would pay a toll as soon as next year under Gov. Christine Gregoire's financing plan to replace the aging span.

The state also should consider a toll on the Interstate 90 bridge to raise additional cash, Gregoire said Thursday, in releasing the 520 proposal...The finance plan assumes a round-trip toll of $6 to $7 during heavy commute hours, starting next year.

My only comment here:  a toll of $6 to $7 bucks might seem unfair.  But -- and this is important -- it's probably what it actually costs to drive across the 520 bridge. 

That is, if you include all the costs when a car crosses that bridge -- wear and tear on the road, maintenance, depreciation of the old facility, construction costs of the new facility, plus the pollution, noise, and congestion costs of a car trip -- then a single  trip across 520 at peak hours probably costs about as much as a cappuccino.

And making the drivers themselves pay those costs, rather than passing them off to all taxpayers, is only fair.  After all, I don't expect taxpayers to pay for my coffee; so why should drivers expect other taxpayers to pay for their car trips?

In 1930, when my grandfather was just 19, he drove with his mother from Seattle to Mt. Vernon, Washington, and stood on the Skagit County courthouse steps, anxiously watching as handful of land auction buyers gathered around him. Without much money in his pocket, he knew that if anyone else in the crowd intended to bid on the parcel that he'd come for, he would walk away with a broken heart.

It was his luck -- and our family's great blessing -- that no one else had come that spring morning to purchase land on Cypress Island - part of the San Juan island archipelago in Washington's Puget Sound, an island that my grandfather had fallen in love with as a kid. That day nearly 80 years ago, he put a 50 dollar cash down-payment on nearly 100 acres on the north end of Cypress, the place that would anchor our family and shape all of our lives.

A few days ago, I stood with my grandfather -- now 97 -- in Mt.Vernon, not more than two blocks from those same courthouse steps, and he, my brother, my dad and I signed and sealed a conservation easement -- another down payment, if you will, that continues our family's stewardship of that land on into the future. A conservation easement is voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust -- usually a non-profit organization -- to permanently limit certain uses (usually subdivision and development) in order to protect the property's natural characteristics in perpetuity. The easement stays with the land even if ownership changes. Perpetuity is a big word, but this contract is meant to last. Our signatures that day made concrete our conviction that the place is not something to possess, rather a place that we have a responsibility to take care of and a legacy we want to leave intact.