Aaron Reardon, Snohomish County Executive, held a town hall  meeting in Monroe, WA the evening of May 13.  What a huge success for Monroe!  There was a standing room only crowd of over fifty people and the majority supported fiscally conservative, constitutional government.  Of course, there were a handful of people who support raising taxes on every issue, but the overwhelming majority supported spending cuts across the board.  Surprisingly, a super majority opposed spending tax dollars on environmental and climate change issues.
    The format for the meeting was a series of issues posed as questions followed by a list of predetermined responses.  After each issue the audience was asked to choose the response they liked best.  The questions were highly contrived and the people made quite a ruckus about it, calling out “loaded questions!, loaded questions!”.  The people made it quite clear that they were onto the tricky questions.  For example, one person pointed out, “At your Lynnwood meeting the other day only 12 people showed up. Because of a lack of adequate advertising of your meeting you now have data that shows that most people support raising taxes for parks.”   I suspect that some who attended the Lynnwood meeting work for the Parks Department and are paid by Snohomish County.  At the Mill Creek meeting, someone asked for a show of hands to determine how many county employees were in attendance.  It turned out to be 16.6%.  Mr. Reardon assured us that he would never use that data to raise taxes.
    It was determined by show of hands that more than half the people attending the meeting in Monroe had only heard about the meeting in the last 48 hours.  Obviously the executive’s office had not advertised the meeting to the people who actually showed up. The majority of attendees had heard about the meeting the day before through an email from Seeds of Liberty.  Five people in my family went.  We made up a voting block of approximately 8%.  Seeds of Liberty members made up a voting block of approximately 70%.  The majority of responses reflected our desire for cutting spending.
    We can have a huge effect on the upcoming budget.  There is one more meeting on Monday, May 17 from 6 to 8 p.m. in Everett, Snohomish County campus, 3000 Rockefeller Ave.  The county plans to post combined responses to the budget questions on its website, www.snoco.org, later this month.  If you didn’t make it to Monroe, PLEASE attend the meeting in Everett.  Your presence will make the difference between “most people support raising taxes” versus “most people support cutting taxes.”

Julie Martinoli
Seeds of Liberty