A class conflict in provision for 13 major egg producers contends that a supply-restriction scheme triggered a pressingly 50% price leap in the past two years

By Brian Burnsed

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The idea for "A Legal Scramble over Egg Prices" came from longtime BusinessWeek reader Gordon W. Campbell, who is President of Campbell Field Airport in Virginia and the Virginia Aviation Council.

Earlier this year, Steve Ribbing, who runs a family-style restaurant south of Buffalo, got fed up with the growing dent in his party’s bottom line. The malefactor? Egg prices, which have jumped nearly 50% over the past two years. Ribbing griped to his attorney, an act that ultimately led to a lawsuit in provision for more than a dozen egg producers and the industry’s trade group.

Critics affirm the price jump since 2006 was not singly mysterious: egg producers, the plaintiffs contend, conspired to restrict supply as part of a broad frame to boost prices. Ribbing’s complaint moved from his lawyer to a large national firm, finally pretty a sweeping lawsuit that recently gained class-action status on behalf of restaurants, grocers, and other turn buyers nationwide. The litigation’sitting targets comprehend 13 of the nation’session biggest egg producers, including Cal-Maine Foods (CALM), Pilgrim’s Pride (PPC) and Rose Acre Farms, as sufficiently as a Georgia-based habitual devotion to labor association, the United Egg Producers (UEP).

The average retail price of a dozen eggs, which had been stable for the better part of a decade, soared to $2.20 per dozen in March, in imitation of climbing from $1.63 in 2007 and $1.30 in 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Egg producers blame the become greater on surging feed and fuel costs, although prices have retreated 15% since March, to $1.85 by means of dozen. The restaurant lawsuit filed three weeks ago in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia is unit of six separate suits facing the egg industry. Some name a handful of companies while others, of a piece the T.K. Ribbing’s restaurant retinue, target 16 major producers and interest groups. The suits generally allege homogeneous schemes to raise prices, but the detailed Ribbing level delves deepest and covers the broadest organ of the industry.

The swift go in egg prices has also caught the watchfulness of the Justice Dept., which is "investigating the possibility of price fixing in the provoke products industry," says DOJ spokeswoman Gina Talamona, declining further make comments. All of the major egg producers either refused make notes or didn’t respond to BusinessWeek’s requests for annotate.

The producers all belong to the United Egg Producers cooperative, which in 2000 enacted an Animal Care Certified Program to improve hens’ conditions by giving them more space in cages. Plaintiffs say the program was designed solely to elevate egg prices by curtailing egg supplies. The total U.S. invest, which grew steadily from 7.1 billion dozen eggs in 2000 to a crown of 7.6 billion dozen in 2006, is down to 7.5 billion dozen this year, according to the U.S. Agriculture Dept. "The singly portion of the program which they enforce are the ones restricting the total number of hens and production," says Jonathan Lovvorn, vice-president and chief opinion of the Humane Society of the U.S. "You defile that, they kick you loudly immediately." He says the co-op ignores "all kinds of other things you can do to animals—not providing proper veterinary care, letting animals die without proper food or water. Those are things we’ve seen."

UEP speaker Mitch Head calls allegations that the welfare program was aimed at trimming hen song "ludicrous." "There’s no provision for any farmer to not build more houses, add more conventional cages, adjoin cage-free or free-range [hens]; they could’ve added being of the kind which many viewed like they wanted to," Head says. The program results in fewer female of the domestic fowl diseases and lower mortality, and improves food safety, he said. "This is not the kind of was better for the farmer. It was better for the hens and for our consumers."

Barack Obama has pledged to name a cabinet-level CTO to have charge of a job-creating national broadband buildout grant that he’s elected. Big names teem

By Tom Lowry

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Barack Obama says that the U.S. is not doing nearly enough to create jobs through technology. Shortly after he launched his campaign, the Illinois Senator promised that if elected, he would produce the first-ever Cabinet-level station of chief technology officer. The household crisis has since made it certain that a White House CTO would come to be one of Obama’s most important advisers, should he triumph in November. "Obama sees greater broadband penetration as an enormous relating to housekeeping engine, much like the railroads were a century ago," says Andrew D. Lipman, a expert communications lawyer in Washington. "That is why the CTO resolution play such a critical role in any recovery sketch out."

Among the candidates who would be considered for the work at jobs, say Washington insiders, are Vint Cerf, Google’s (GOOG) "chief internet evangelist," who is often cited as one of the fathers of the Internet; Microsoft (MSFT) chief executive functionary Steve Ballmer; Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeffrey Bezos; and Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. An Obama campaign spokesman did not return phone calls seeking comment about potential CTO candidates.

Obama—who has effectively used the Internet and social networks throughout his campaign to raise funds, engage voters, and put forward policy positions—has lengthy criticized the Bush administration for not doing more to increase broadband penetration in the U.S., singly in rural areas. The country ranked 15th in the midst of industrial nations in penetration, with a mere 23 out of 100 Americans having access to broadband service, according to a report released earlier this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A White House CTO would be expected to help create incentive programs to expand broadband’s fetch, particularly requisition credits for smaller carriers. But the tech czar would almost certainly be deeply involved in overseeing a federally-backed $50 billion hazard capital fund that Obama has proposed to develop more environmentally friendly technology.

What is less clear is how a CTO would interact with the Federal Communications Commission. While the FCC chairman does not belong to the Cabinet, the one filling that role has traditionally been a leading voice on issues of media, telecommunications, and technology. It is widely expected that President Bush’s appointed FCC chair, Kevin Martin, would remove along the course of if Obama were elected. Sources say Obama might afterwards consider appointing his former Harvard Law School classmate and rife campaign adviser, Julius Genachowski, to the chairman’s post. A former adviser to FCC chairs Reed Hundt and Bill Kennard, Genachowski won plaudits for his work as crop executory at Barry Diller’sitting IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). More recently, Genachowski has been running his own venture capital stable, Rock Creek Ventures.

One who does not foresee conflict between a CTO and the FCC, whose charge is mainly regulatory, is Lawrence Lessig, a noted scholar on law in the digital age and the founder of Stanford University’s Center as being the Internet and Society. Lessig says he sees the positions as "orthogonal"—or vertical—to one another. "That said, I effect cherish a thought of the CTO could be a critically important position, from deciding how to make government more efficient and transparent through technology, to helping advance public policy questions resembling those surrounding global warning." Lessig, who would certainly be considered a solicitant beneficial to the job of CTO, says he has not been approached by anyone on Obama’session cudgel and adds that he would not be interested.

Princeton’s Felten says he has not been approached through Obama’sitting team one or the other, limit believes a state CTO is necessary for these periods. He sees the job as holding far-reaching responsibilities. "First, the CTO could act as the cybersecurity autocrat of all the russias, ensuring that reliability of the government infrastructure is protected. And a great quantity like the role of presidential science adviser, the CTO could exhibit advice to the president on all areas of technology. The role could be a catalyst to push us closer to being a more entrepreneurial, high-tech country." When asked if he would exist interested in the job, Felten replied: "Almost anyone would be interested in doing that job." Bezos and Ballmer were less forthcoming; each declined to make notes. Through a spokesman, Cerf said: "I have not had any contact with the Obama campaign on this topic."

Amid the upheaval, big producers at investment houses are being urged by customers to irritate to independent firms

By Ben Levisohn

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It was almost of a piece the end of a marriage for broker Lori Van Dusen. After 22 years at Citigroup (C) managing client money, she decided it was time to leave.

From her Rochester (N.Y.) office, Van Dusen manages money for high-net-worth families and institutions, with her average client bill worth around $40 million. Brokers like Van Dusen switch firms total the time. But her reasons for leaving are certainly not typical of many brokers. Van Dusen already had a degree of autonomy that’s rare in the brokerage industry. However, the approval process in the place of a new investing. was long-winded and arduous and Van Dusen believed it was in the most wise interest of her clients to remark a firm than catered to the needs of high-net-worth investors.

So after a year and a half of looking at options with her partner, George Dunn, she beyond a doubt to join Convergent Wealth Advisors. Together, the team brought around $7 billion in retainer effects, else than doubling Convergent’s bulk. &qout;We had a profession inside a business," Van Dusen says. "But we desire a sophisticated dependant base and we needed an infrastructure designed for our clients."

In the industry, Van Dusen is known like a breakaway broker. For many years after this, many brokers have left their wirehouse homes to become independent. Amid the current confusion onward Wall Street, that outflow has increased from a resolute run to a rush. It’s difficult to quantify exact numbers—no one can express exactly how many brokers have left in the past year. But assets transferred from these brokers to independent brokerages like Charles Schwab (SCHW), Fidelity Investments, and TD Ameritrade (AMTD) have increased tremendously.

In the highest half of 2008, Fidelity gained 55 breakaway brokers and $7 billion in assets. Schwab Institutional, a alienation of Charles Schwab, added $9.4 billion in net new property from newly independent advisers during the first half of 2008, up 300% from the same period last year and outpacing 2007’s total $9.2 billion. "If you look at the 5,000 advisors associated with Schwab, that little ragtag body of troops has outgained the entire Wall Street combined in the last decade," says Timothy Welsh, president of Nexus Strategy, a dense that assists brokers in going independent.

Wall Street should be worried. The departing advisers are not the B-team. Rather, many are preference Van Dusen and have been at their firms for years. They’re older—60% liberty during their 40s and 50s, according to information from Discovery Database, which tracks adviser movement. They’re also established—83% of brokers considering leaving have assets of $10 million or more when exposed to management and 33% have more than $100 million, according to a survey by the Aite Group, a Boston-based consulting firm. "The advisers who are leaving are the ones that the firms would like to retain," says Aite Group analyst Alois Pirker.

Why the exodus? For individual, there are fewer reasons to stay. Firms similar Schwab and Fidelity now specialize in setting up an adviser’sitting infrastructure, everything from clearing trades to monetary software, which helps make for a seamless change. Furthermore, with the stock prices of Wall Street firms decimated, the value of the shares that provided additional compensation and gave advisers a stake in the company’session future have plummeted. The once "golden handcuffs" are now aluminum foil.

Amid a boom in social-network-friendly handsets, Motorola prepares a new entry, but its Android may not debut to the time when 2009’s helper quarter

By Olga Kharif

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Photo: Getty Images; Illustration: Angelos Dosoulas

As the wireless world awaits the Oct. 22 debut of the first phone based on the Google-backed Android software, engineers at Motorola (MOT) are hard at work on their concede Android handset. Motorola’s version will boast an iPhone-like touch protect, a slide-out qwerty keyboard, and a host of social-network-friendly features, BusinessWeek.com has skilled.

Motorola has been showing spec sheets and images of the phone to carriers around the world in the past two months and is likely to introduce the handset in the U.S. sometime in the second quarter of 2009, according to nation familiar with Motorola’s plans. Building a phone based on the highly anticipated Android operating system is part of Motorola’s effort to revive a loss-making handset division that has forfeited market share in the midst of a drought of bestselling phones. Motorola stock, which on Oct. 17 rose a penny to 5.62, is hovering near a 16-year low.

The phone will appear amid a of the present day class of social smartphones designed to make it easy for users to connect readily and easily to mobile social networks such as Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace (BusinessWeek, 10/10/08). Such phones hindrance users message in-network friends directly from phone contact palaestra, in quest of example. A Facebook representative declined to annotate on the company’session work with Motorola. MySpace.com didn’t respond to a petition for for comment.

Motorola declined to elaborate put on its plans, but uttered in a statement: "We’re excited about the violent departure from established precedent possibilities on Android and look forward to delivering great products in partnership with Google (GOOG)" and the community of developers known during the time that the Open Handset Alliance that are working in succession the Android operating regularity.

In the next year, social networking phones are expected to have being a hit with the 16- to 34-year-old crowd, analysts say. According to consultancy Informa (INF), the number of mobile social-networking users will rise from 2.3% of global cell-phone users at the end of 2007 to considered in the state of crowd as 23% of all mobile users by the end of 2012.

The Android handset will make a touch screen about the size of those on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, people cordial with the phone say. While it takes some of the design cues from Krave ZN4, the first touch-screen phone from Motorola launched with Verizon Wireless adhering Oct. 14, it’s not certain whether the Android phone screen will fashion Krave’s distinctive and interactive quick flip screen.

Like the world’session capital Android phone, from HTC, Motorola’s Android-based design will offer a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. People who’ve seen the pictures and spec sheets for the device say it looks like a higher-end rendition of the HTC phone, called the T-Mobile G1. But it’s expected to sell for less, at prices similar to the Krave, what one. is available as far as concerns $150 with a two-year contract. After carrier subsidies, the G1 will deal out in small portions for $180 with a two-year contract.

Motorola’session new phone likely won’t be ready to launch in the U.S.

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MOTHER Nature helped make the question for change at the top of the state Department of Natural Resources. Devastating slides off clear-cut woodland land in Lewis County in December 2007 washed away our support for incumbent state Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland.

Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark, an Okanogan rancher with a doctorate in corpuscular biology and new strains of wheat to his credit, is the right candidate to infuse lapse of pomp trust lands with an appreciation for the role of body of knowledge.

Management of DNR is a big work at jobs. The commissioner oversees millions of acres of state-owned timber and aquatic lands. The office also has responsibility for harvest levels adhering industrial-scale forestland and small lots. In the summer, the department runs the state’s biggest fire department.

Last winter’s flooding in Lewis County caused $57 million in property damage. A Seattle Times investigation pointed toward some deficiency of expert review of move smoothly in posse on land approved for clear-cutting. State Department of Transportation officials were loudest near to a lack of coordination and follow-through on geological surveys and stability assessments.

Sutherland generally lays the blame adhering freak winds and note rainfall, but initiated a departmental review. Goldmark sees lax management and eroding oversight.

After twice endorsing Sutherland, we are drawn to Goldmark’s according to principles background and his bigger worldview according to the department and the liberality of DNR’s areas of influence. Goldmark makes his living in agriculture, he knows about managing the land to maximize production. State revenues along public lands are important to schools and communities that rely on gather in income. Goldmark gets that.

But Goldmark be able to in like manner take the position into a leadership role on Puget Sound cleanup, pay attention to clean water supplies and be mindful of climate-change issues.

Goldmark, a longtime member of the Washington State University Board of Regents, offers great potential for binding the eastern and western halves of the state on big pecuniary means themes. He lacks Sutherland’s management experience, however the charge obviously demands something more.

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Before the fiscal crisis, there was the global climate crisis. After the fiscal crisis, we’ll still have the global climate crisis — for the quietness of our lives.

A nightmarish that will be awaits our children unless we can forge international accords, with teeth, to cut carbon emissions — the kind the Bush control has scorned. But top-down won’cheek by jowl do it all: Thousands of low-carbon strategies distress to be fashioned from America’s grass roots.

The severity of the threat is underscored by dint of. new reports indicating worldwide carbon emissions rose almost 3 percent last year alone. That growth trajectory, allowing that continued, would conduct to a highly alarming temperature rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit by hundred years’s end. Among the likely consequences: large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers and the Arctic’s summer sea ice. A dangerous rise in the sea state of equality would lead an ominous chain of reactions.

A recent surge in emissions from such rapidly industrializing countries as China, India and Brazil makes the challenge even tougher. Those nations aren’t likely to consider significant cutbacks unless the nations with the biggest per-capita carbon-emission rates — especially the United States — undertake serious, sweeping efforts themselves.

Below the federal level, America has started significant efforts. Top items: On Sept. 25, six Northeastern states held the first “cant” of carbon permits, selling allowances to power plants in the nation’s first cap-and-trade system. And the Northeasterners (Maryland, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont) aren’t alone. The Western Climate Initiative (Arizona, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington) will readily dilate a cap-and-trade system that embraces manufacturing and vehicles of the same kind with well as power plants.

While imperfect, such measures set the antecedent for a meaningful nationwide carbon-control system that the next president and Congress be possible to send nationwide.

California has been America’session champion among the states in setting major carbon-reduction goals. Its latest breakthrough: a new law to divide emissions by rewarding cities and counties that fashion their unfolding rules to limit carbon dioxide-spawning urban sprawl.

Delaware Treasurer Jack Markell, leading in his state’s governor race, is pushing a “climate prosperity strategy” that would shape carbon-dioxide reductions central to Delaware’s entire economic-development efforts. Among his goals: creating a “green” supply chain for the state’sitting businesses, training a “green work force” for massive energy-efficiency modernization of households and businesses, and promoting so industries as electric cars.

And there’s significant action at the city equal elevation — unruffled superior to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to aim in quest of Kyoto Protocol carbon-reduction goals. Proposed by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, 884 mayors are now onboard.

Goals are one thing, comprehensive carbon-cutting programs another. On that score, New York (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ambitious “PlanNYC”), Portland, Ore., Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston and Denver are among those with the most emulous agendas.

What’s now dawning is a recognition that a central city is just one apportionment of a metro area — that for climate steps to make a significative difference, the entire citistate, suburbs and satellite cities included, need to be part of the planning and force.

Recognizing that, Washington’s King County took an early lead under County Executive Ron Sims. The Puget Sound Regional Council is onboard, including an imaginative “Cascade Agenda” to protect 1.3 million acres of the region’s farm and forestland from development.

Chicago will face the challenge next. Mayor Richard Daley and civic leaders recently unveiled a enlarged climate action custom, a road chart of 29 actions to curb greenhouse emissions in areas from an updated energy building digest to pushing general body of mankind transit.

But it took a Washington, D.C.-area blogger to memorandum for what reason insufficient Chicago’sitting trial may be if the environs and edge cities where the most people live aren’t included.

There is faith: Regional planners in recent years acquire laid out a “Chicagoland” vision that would guidegrowth into city and town centers and protect open distance and farmland, promoting walking and biking.

True regionalism is perking in Northern California, at what place three mayors — Chuck Reed of San Jose, Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, and Ron Dellums of Oakland — have forged with business and civic leaders a Bay Area Climate Change Compact with goals ranging from 20,000 “green collar” jobs to big boosts beneficial to renewable energy.

“Rather than solely relying on city-by-city efforts, our regional climate-change compact will galvanize the horsepower of 100 cities, towns and counties across the Bay Area,” before-mentioned Carl Guardino, charged with execution of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Goals and true carbon savings aren’t, but, synonymous. As Dellums trenchantly eminent: “At the extremity of the sunlight, we’re at the margins of each enormous question that dwarfs us altogether.”

Neal Peirce’s column appears regularly steady editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com

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America’s government-by-television expedient instantly memorable resemblance is everything. Our electoral decisions pivot less on issues and positions than on caricature — Dukakis peering revealed of a tank, Quayle misspelling potato, Kerry “looking French,” as Republicans claimed. Rare is the iconography that represents deeper substance.

Until now.

As election day approaches, once-safe Republican senators taste Elizabeth Dole (N.C.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Norm Coleman (Minn.) are struggling against Democrats who are using their economic conservatism to coloring matter them to the degree that elitists. The review is working the one and the other because of the imminent recession and because these incumbents look the faction. To paraphrase an attack on failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, these pols don’t remind voters of co-workers, but of bosses “who laid them off.”

No Republican, though, says aristocrat like Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon. And no Senate election could more intensely shift relating to housekeeping politics than his state’s.

If Kerry looked preference a professor at La Sorbonne, then Smith resembles a playboy at the Monte Carlo Casino. The son of any Eisenhower administration official and heir to a food-processing corporation, Smith grew up in the ritzy D.C. environs and today lives on Bethesda’s aptly named Country Club Road. In a profile titled “From Profits to Politics,” the recite’s largest newspaper described him as a guy who “unabashedly enjoys spending” his millions on Ferraris, mansions and “weekend trips to New York to window shop.”

Since buying Oregon’s senate seat in 1996, Smith has maintained high approval ratings by voting right wing on social and economic issues and feigning liberal on a handful of themes like hate crimes.

This is a well-trod Republican passage in swing states — a lock-step conservative make a memorandum of builds clearness in GOP strongholds, and occasionally tolerant-sounding but legislatively meaningless artificial eloquence peels off votes in Democratic bastions.

This year, though, Smith is running for re-election against Democrat Jeff Merkley — the son of a sawmill operative who, as Oregon House discourser, made his name cracking down on predatory lenders. More Paul Bunyan than Paul Allen, Merkley is running on his record as an economic populist, airing ads hammering a tuxedo-clad Smith as antidote to supporting corporate tax cuts and the recent Wall Street bailout. He aims to flip Smith’s calculations on their head, betting he can maintain Democratic margins in cities and middle-class border and cut into Republican favor in pastoral and working-class areas — a smart gamble.

Political analysts have long berated populism — i.e., pushing monetary regulation, progressive taxation and trade reforms — as blue-collar pandering only effective in the industrial Northeast and Midwest. In the Northwest, the conventional wisdom says that in which case populism may appeal to Oregon’sitting 70,000 manufacturing and timber workers who lost jobs to foreign competition, it alienates the latte-swilling office parkers who comprise the state’s white-collar “new economy.”

“When I see his ads in front of a mill that was closed,” said Smith in attacking Merkley’s criticism of free trade, “I wonder what humbler classes at Nike think, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Columbia Sportswear, whose jobs are directly dependent on trade.”

Smith hopes Merkley’session pocketbook pitches to historically conservative areas like timber-producing Douglas County will alienate high-tech workers in confines take pleasure in Washington County (called “Silicon Forest”). But with Merkley surging in polls, the opposite may be happening.

The Great American Class War ravaging the industrial sector is now pillaging the information sector, too. As Intel boasts of outsourcing, HP lays most distant thousands and Wall Street eviscerates 401(k) plans, a new blue-collar/white-collar mutual responsibility is emerging. That substance today, as for the time of the Great Depression, progressive economic arguments increasingly work across cultural, geographic and employment divides, tectonically realigning politics and — potentially — policy.

Should Merkley disconcert Oregon’s tycoon senator in the heart of the “new economy,” the tremors of that realignment will become a civil earthquake.

David Sirota’s new book is “The Uprising.” He is a comrade at the Campaign according to America’session Future and a board branch of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota

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Countless times, Tim Eyman says, he’s seen freeway lanes jammed to a crawl at midday or toward the time of the evening, while an adjacent HOV alley is parsimoniously empty.

“It just struck me as with equal reason fundamentally unfair,” said Eyman. “Everybody pays for these lanes. You ought to exist expert to use them at least some of the time.”

So Eyman, Washington’session perennial initiative promoter, made opening those lanes in “nonpeak” hours a elucidation part of his Initiative 985 on the Nov. 4 ticket. The extent would also call into existence a state fund to fight traffic repletion, direct cities to exist simultaneous traffic lights, restrict the use of tolls and make other policy changes.

Former state Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald, capital spokesman close up to I-985, acknowledges there’s a “seductive appeal” to the notion of flaw HOV lanes.

But he says Eyman’session proposals would actually increase congestion, call into existence traffic hazards, jeopardize federal funds for projects here, packing efforts to erect a new Highway 520 bridge and drain money from even now depleted state coffers.

“It’s not going to move us presuming,” said MacDonald. “It’s going to set us back and foretaste real solutions that do make much more of a difference.”

Eyman declared traffic congestion has reached a crisis point because state officials haven’t made it a priority — a point he said has been noted by State Auditor Brian Sonntag. I-985, Eyman declared, would “give Olympia a swift kick in the shins.”

He disputes what he calls the “gloom and doom” scenario MacDonald paints, and even downplays the scope of his own proposals.

“We’ve done some in fact assaulting, bold proposals over the years. This isn’t common of them,” said Eyman, best known for measures to limit car-license fees and property taxes. “This one’s about making some incremental progress, just moving the ball in the right direction.”

Opponents beg to vary. “His ideas are coming from somewhere out in right field,” MacDonald uttered. “Not even upright field, but-end out in the bleachers.”

For starters, MacDonald said, contemplate the money: According to the state’s Office of Financial Management (OFM), I-985, by tapping into the sales assessment on cars and other sources, would pull some $574 million from the state’s general-fund budget over five years. That’s money OFM says would otherwise be spent upon education, public safety, social services or other government programs.

Eyman calls the money without more “a sliver” of the state’s roughly $15 billion annual general fund, and says improving traffic flow resoluteness ultimately benefit the arrangement.

The centerpiece provision would undisguised high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes to all commerce except during the hours of 6 to 9 a.fray. and 3 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

But MacDonald says heavy traffic in the Puget Sound realm has on account of years extended far above the peak periods the measure defines.

Keeping HOV lanes restricted to buses and carpools creates some incentive for the many the crowd to get out of single-occupant cars. In etc., MacDonald said, state, local and treaty agencies have been cooperating to build an extensive Puget Sound HOV-lane system, “limit this puts a knife right through the heart of it.”

Some freeway-access ramps, including those built as Sound Transit projects, were designed to compose a limited number of vehicles, particularly without ceasing ramps leading from, or into, the left lane of a freeway, such since Interstate 405.

Putting heavy commerce on those ramps would rear vehicles up onto the freeway, creating a hazard, MacDonald said.

Letters from officials of the Federal Highway Administration approved those projects with the specific condition they not be opened to general traffic.

“We would be very concerned about a degradation of transit performance in that corridor,” Tyler Duvall, a U.S. Department of Transportation undersecretary, said last week. But Duvall and other treaty officials declined to say what steps they might take if the initiative passes.

State Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond says she’s staying neutral onward the initiative, but she added, “I have power to see a conflict coming” if it passes.

Opening more HOV lanes in off-peak times could be relatively complying, she said, but in other spots, contracts with other government agencies and even environmental permits may inhibit or shut out the changes I-985 calls for. “We may need a court to help interpret and define that,” Hammond before-mentioned.

In addition, Hammond said, some HOV lanes may be hazardous for general traffic because they are narrower than regular lanes, built on shoulders or thrust close to guardrails or bridge supports. Hammond said she’first attempt close an HOV lane entirely rather than operate it in an unsafe manner.

Members of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, including professionals who worked on many highway projects in Washington, issued a report saying Eyman’sitting proposals would “grow congestion and possibly impact safeness.”

Eyman’sitting response: “Those are some of the identical transportation experts that have created this mess … Let’s try something sundry.”

The Washington Policy Center think reservoir gave the initiative a generally favorable resolution, praising the fact that it ties public spending to relieving traffic congestion. But the center said in that place will be some drawbacks, including increased travel time on bus routes.

Anyone who wants to diocese a strange Highway 520 floating bridge should contradict I-985, says King County Executive Ron Sims. The metre would frontier the use of toll revenue to the route on which the toll is collected, with any undue amount going to the traffic-congestion consols.

“If you only limit tolls to 520, you cannot rebuild 520,” reported Sims, who favors tolling both the 520 and I-90 bridges. Sims predicts no one would pervert with money bonds necessary to build a new 520 bridge if motorists could avoid tolls simply by the agency of using I-90, substantially cutting the revenue 520 tolls could generate.

In response, Eyman before-mentioned if a toll isn’t used on the project where it’s collected, it’s really not a toll, it’s just another tax officials could spend wherever they see sudden.

“Governments for all of history have said, ‘But we really privation the money.’ ” Eyman declared. “That’s no reason to just violate every principle that’s ever been on the books.”

Eyman notes that state House Speaker Frank Chopp was recently quoted viewed like saying if tolls were collected forward I-90, they should be used “inside the I-90 corridor.”

On Friday, without elaborating on his position in succession tolls, Chopp issued a statement distancing himself from Eyman’s value. “I am completely and unalterably opposed to Initiative 985,” Chopp said. “Passage of this misguided initiative will take money from home from kids, families, and schools — and that’s suitable wrong.”

The unseen presence in every discussion of I-985 is Sonntag, who last year released a 222-page audit on traffic plethora, with a set of 22 recommendations.

Eyman says Sonntag’s examine, and legislators’ lack of action on congestion, inspired I-985. But opponents note that hardly any of Eyman’s proposals actually come from the audit.

Sonntag, when asked about I-985, is cautious. “I hate to cause to sound like I’m sitting on a watchman use the sword,” Sonntag said. “[But] I’scuffle not part of Tim’s initiative, nor am I part of the opposition to it.”

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or seattletimes.com”>jbroom@seattletimes.com

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Seattle

A 22-year-old man was hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center in relation to vital principle shot in his car Saturday night.

Seattle police responded to reports of multiple shots fired at about 11 p.m. near 14th Avenue Northeast and 123rd Street and found the victim in his car.

He suffered severe be pointed and neck wounds and remained at Harborview through life-threatening injuries, Seattle police spokesman Mark Jamieson said.

Police believe two weapons were used in the shooting. The department’s homicide and gang units are investigating.

King County

2 men arrested in shooting death

Two men were arrested in connection with the shooting death of one man and the wounding of another seasonable Sunday.

King County sheriff’s prolocutor John Urquhart said the two suspects, one as well as the other in their 20s, were thrown out of a party in the area of Southeast 173rd Place and 139th Avenue Southeast. They returned just before 4 a.household management. and allegedly shot a 25-year-old man vapid.

No information was available without interruption the man who was injured in the shooting.

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