That phrase has been plastered all over our little city. Every major intersection had 5, 6, 10…. signs that said to Vote Yes for Jobs! It got me curious… so when we received our little voters pamphlet in the mail, first thing I did was look up what the proposition was. In a nutshell, the county wanted to increase our property taxes. The proposition:

Shall the Port of Vancouver Commission levy an Industrial Development District property tax of no more than forty-five cents per thousand dollars of assessed value, for a period not to exceed six years, collection to begin in 2008, for the purpose of acquiring, developing and improving underutilized land and building rail service to support economic and industrial development in the region, all as provided in Resolution No. 8-2007, adopted by the Port Commission on May 22, 2007?

The idea sounds good in theory, right? We’ll create TONS of jobs and it will all be hunky dory! You can read about the Proposition 1 Pro view at the Columbian website as well as the Proposition 1 Cons. The bottom line is we property owners pay more taxes on a gamble. There was no guarantees.

Well, the Voters sink port tax increase. I wanted to vote NO on this and fully intended to… but since I’m an airhead, I forgot. I guess I need not worry.

What gets me about the whole thing is this comment:

Miller said it’s evident to him that people want job creation but don’t want to pay for it through their property taxes.

Again, there was NO guarantee the levy would bring jobs. None. Gawd I hate politicians.