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Doug Clark: Right-Wingosaurus Spokane’s most endangered species
I met Mike Fagan, the City Council’s lone conservative, Thursday afternoon in a North Side restaurant.
My quest was simple. I wanted to find out from Fagan’s perspective what it’s like to continually wear such a high mark of extinction.
The problem for Fagan is that Council President Ben Stuckart and the rest of his cabal lean slightly to the left of, say, Red China.
They’re very committed to important, warm and squishy causes like branding Spokane as a “compassionate city” and taking away our constitutional rights to bear elephant hooks.
Poor Councilman Fagan has been on the losing end of enough 6-to-1 votes to give any man a complex.
In scientific terms, during Monday night council meetings Fagan is lonelier than Pat Boone at Woodstock, ignored more than underwear at the Kaniksu Nudist Ranch and loved less than Kennewick Man on Valentine’s Day.
“At times it’s frustrating. At times it angers me,” he conceded. But “I’m not up there for me. I’m not up there for them. I’m there for the people who put me up there.”
Some members of the council “have forgotten that,” he added.
Always here to help, I told Fagan he should ask Stuckart to build him one of those “safe rooms” that are quite popular on college campuses these days.
Safe rooms give students a place to recover from the emotional strain of hearing scary words like “Trump” or anything else they might disagree with.
Fagan said the idea of having his own safe room in the council chambers was appealing. But only if it came with a TV monitor to watch the council meetings and a button so he could continue to cast his irrelevant vote.
Speaking of which, Fagan is dismayed by the City Council’s latest effort to ram an electric folly down our throats.
Oops. I meant electric trolley, which they’ve now dubbed “bus rapid transit,” also known as the Central City Line. The bus would make a 6-mile odyssey from Browne’s Addition to Spokane Community College and back again.
Last April, however, the public rejected the proposal in a close vote.
Fortunately for all of us, the council minus naysayer Fagan is not about to let a little thing like the democratic process keep Spokane from having an electric trolley.
In the latest wrinkle, “the Spokane Transit Authority board voted to place a renewed transit proposal before voters in November,” a Friday news story reported.
Fagan rejects the trolley notion because the numbers don’t, as they say, pencil out.
The project, according to the councilman, will cost $75 million upfront and another annual $4 million to $5 million to keep going.
Yet studies show that our buses at best average maybe two dozen passengers and four screaming brats per vehicle.
Fagan thinks this is another one of those far-left “if they build it they will come” pipe dreams that only work out in melodramas.
Once again, I think there’s an easy solution to this problem. I encouraged Fagan to immediately introduce a bill that would increase the bus rate to $6,000 a ride.
This way we can have our planet-saving electric trolley and not have to worry about the public’s general lack of interest in public transit.
As an additional complaint concerning our so-called nonpartisan City Council, Fagan handed me a “Schedule A” form dating back to last October.
It showed that the Coalition for Economic Vitality – the committee that ran the unsuccessful Yes campaign for the April bus vote – also donated $800 apiece toward the council campaigns of Stuckart, Lori Kinnear and Karen Stratton.
Oh, I almost forgot. The director on record for the Coalition of Economic Vitality was none other than then-City Councilman Jon Snyder.
Not that there’s anything illegal about this, but Fagan’s right. This is one cozy cabal.
“I call this squid pro quo,” harrumphed the Right-Wingosaurus. “Because it drips of slime and reeks to high heaven.”
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.