Please join us in approving Proposition 1, which allows the Port of Port Townsend to levy taxes to maintain and improve the infrastructure critical to the prosperity of our marine trades and industry.

1. Yes, paying taxes is a sacrifice. We live in a comfortable home and our share would be, at the most, some $250 per year. Both of us benefited from the taxes paid by previous generations. Both of us have been blessed by the efforts of our forebears to leave the world a better place than they found it. It is human nature to support the community. We want to do that.

2. The younger generations are having a tougher economic time than we did. Our port commissioners want to do the responsible thing and give them the tools to succeed.

3. Opponents of this proposition claim the port isn’t looking to promote business wherever it can, including inland areas. In debates, Port Commissioner Bill Putney reports that the commission is doing just that.

Opponents claim the port will waste infrastructure money in areas subject to rising sea level. They hear in public debate that Putney and commission candidate Pam Petranek have the same concern.

Opponents accuse the commissioners of being inept and charging below-market rents. They know that the below-market leases were entered into before our current slate of commissioners took office. Yet they repeat their false charges.

4. The really wasteful thing would be to sit on our money and let our port infrastructure, which everyone agrees needs maintenance and improvement, degrade further. Our commissioners are competent. If you keep insisting they produce a detailed cost analysis of every dollar they will need to spend—and do that an election cycle in advance, while the environment and economic factors change ever more quickly—you pretty much guarantee paralysis. We see this in Seattle, where moneyed interests started shooting down transit infrastructure in 1965. Those moneyed interests did well. Not so much, the Seattle wage-earners.

We’re for our local wage-earners. We want to conserve what is here. Please join us.

Douwe and Jill Rienstra
Port Townsend