Meanwhile, at the Secretary of State’s office, someone filed an initiative to rename the fallen and resurrected Skagit River Bridge for initiative entrepreneur Tim Eyman. . .

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The sponsor, Nicholas Santos of Bothell, seems to want to draw negative attention to Eyman’s tax-cutting initiatives without realizing that for Eyman attention is its own reward, whether negative or positive. Something like this helps burnish his reputation while making his opponents look small.

It’s not a completely new idea, as colleague Jerry Cornfield of the Everett Herald noted.  The meme has kicked around the internet since a Daily Kos writer suggested sticking Eyman’s moniker on the bridge the day after the incident. The collapse was caused by a truck hauling an oversized load hitting an upper span.

Santos paid his $5 to turn the idea into an initiative, but says he has neither the resources nor the expertise to get the nearly 250,000 valid signatures needed to send it to the Legislature.

That’s probably just as well, considering it has a few technical problems. It would name the span the Tim Eyman Memorial Bridge, a designation reserved for the dearly departed and based on e-mails that regularly hit my Inbox, Eyman is very much alive. It describes the highway from Vancouver to the Canadian border as state route 5. That’s actually Interstate 5; Washington doesn’t have a state route 5.

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