Seattle public utilities implementing a 40% increase in rates over 3 years.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/seattlepolitics/archives/144996.aspOfficials say the increases are being sought to keep pace with inflation - including rising fuel and labor costs...
Officially, inflation rates are nowhere near 40% over 3 years. We simultaneously have inflation when needed to explain away rate increases, and also not have it when inconvenient to disclose.
...and to retire debt incurred in the replacement of aging infrastructure.
All they have done is covered over the reservoirs, to keep the wild geese out of them (long story...an engineer working on a dam in eastern Washington felt sorry for some Canadian geese who were flooded out of their home--so he put them in the back of his pickup truck, and let them loose in Western Washington, where oddly enough despite being beautifully adapted to our many wetlands here they had never existed here before...and their population exploded...).
At this point, it is almost impossible to accomplish any projects comparable to the gargantuan public works of our industrial past. I don't think we could build something like Grand Coulee dam anymore; the payroll would be massively bloated with superfluous personnel hired for purely political reasons.
