The City Attorney just sued to block the Referendum against the Highway 99 Tunnel. Does he have the legal right to do that? He is an independently elected official. My view is he cannot strike out on his own and sue to stop a referendum to stop the tunnel that has enough signatures to be on the fall ballot. I think he has to be defending some branch of the city. The mayor didn’t ask him to sue. The Mayor is totally in favor of the referendum being on the ballot and the tunnel stopped. The city council is for the tunnel but had no meetings to take a vote about what to do with the referendum, so he isn’t working on their behalf. I would think it should be illegal for the city attorney to take it upon himself to sue for anything that he has not been instructed to do. He says he will save the city millions of dollars if he blocks the referendum. Well why doesn’t he block the school levy, it would save billions and billions? We the people have no choice about putting the school levy on the ballot, but we the people did have a choice about putting the tunnel referendum on. We have more than enough signatures showing we want to vote on it. The King County Council has not instructed him to stop it. He did it on his own almost the minute it was shown to have enough signatures.
For sure the city signed contracts before and during the time “we the people paying for it” were working to get a vote. It was a slimy, (not clever at all) way to muddle up the mess.
For City Attorney Peter Holmes to say he did it to save the taxpayers money and hold a straight face takes some fine acting. None of the politicians give one hoot in hell about saving taxpayers money. That is the one thing they do not even consider. They have proved that time and time again. The tunnel is the most expensive. How did that save me money?
