June 10, 2013
Having been entertained by friends in England who enjoy wine, we thought that we would send them some Washington wine as a thank-you. We tried to order Washington wine in London for delivery, only to find that the English haven’t discovered us. They have some limited acquaintance with California and with — oh, the insult — Oregon, but not with us, so we sent French and Italian.

However, in one way Washington is famous, or perhaps notorious. The bartender at a café at Heathrow knew about the recent bridge collapse, knew that it is north of Seattle, on I-5, over the Skagit (pronounced with broad a and hard g) River. Wonderful; we’re known for the failure of our infrastructure.

When we returned, I found a column in The Seattle Times by Danny Westneat addressing reactions to the incident: "Last week I wondered if the collapse of an I-5 bridge might jar us to fix up our deteriorating old infrastructure. Or if we would crouch back into our played-out ‘no new taxes’ political torpor. The torpor it is." As he noted, and to no one’s surprise, Tim Eyman was appalled that some Democrats in the Legislature suggested that we raise funds to deal with vulnerable bridges, or in his terms, were "ghoulishly, crassly, exploitatively, and predictably demanding the Legislature unilaterally raise taxes . . . "[46] By "unilaterally," he means without a referendum; so much for representative (efficient, effective) government.

The excuse for continued neglect is that the bridge collapsed because a truck clipped one of its supports, so it’s just an unforseen event. Eyman again: " An accident is an accident and it's kind of hard to peg that on anybody else except the driver of a big truck driving at 15 feet on a 14 foot bridge. There's clearly a lot of people that are trying to exploit this bridge accident in order to push tax increases."[47]

Westneat also quoted two Republican legislators to the effect that no action is needed, even though there are many "structurally deficient" bridges in the state.[48] One of the legislators seemed outraged that there would be any response; here’s his muddled analysis: "What a joke. I said it last night when I saw the news [of the collapse, apparently]. I said, this is going to be [Governor] Inslee standing on the grandstand and saying, ‘See, this is why we need to pass the transportation package,’ and then the rest of the country will start saying look, our infrastructure is collapsing. But you could strike a brand-new bridge with a semi-truck and it will come down. I am just beside myself about how idiotic we have become."[49] In other words, if the Governor points out that collapsing bridges call for remedial action, that’s merely political posturing; having the country take note of our inability to provide safe transportation is no big deal.

The notion that we ought to build bridges that don’t fall down when bumped (not, apparently, a rare occurrence) is as foreign to him as to Eyman. The idiocy lies in sacrificing public safety on the altar of tax avoidance.

Westneat ended with this observation: "I have never bought the left-wing line that Republicans actually want government to fail. But they don’t seem to be trying all that hard to make it work." There is ample evidence that many Republicans want government to fail, or at least to shrink to the point of insignificance, but he’s certainly right that this is good example at least of indifference to making it work.
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46. http://mynorthwest.com/?sid=2281751&nid=651
47. http://mynorthwest.com/646/2283862/Antitax-crusader-says-blaming-him-for-I5-bridge-collapse-is-ghoulish-and-crass  
48. http://blogs.asce.org/govrel/2013/05/21/washington-state-report-card-released-today/  
49. http://washingtonstatewire.com/blog/inslee-warned-of-minnesota-style-freeway-bridge-collapse-on-monday-just-before-i-5-disaster/