Voters tilt toward trust

What was really on the ballot in Tuesday's election was trust.

As in, do you trust the government with your money? For as long as I've been covering politics in Washington — 15 years — voters statewide have answered that question with an unequivocal no.

That may have changed Tuesday. Something tilted back the other way.

People here might have started to believe in state government again.

Not strongly, perhaps only a tiny bit. But it's enough to be noticed after more than a decade of anti-tax, anti-government fervor.

In the biggest issue on Tuesday's ballot — Initiative 912, to repeal a whopping new gas tax — we were asked whether we trust the government with $8.5 billion of our money.

Whether we believed the state transportation experts, who said the condition of our roads and bridges is dangerously poor.

And whether we had faith that government would actually use this money on roads, instead of squandering it.

Wrapped up in the campaign was a decade's worth of suspicion, cynicism and doubt about poor-performing public servants. Not to mention a righteous outrage that the governor and state lawmakers had arrogantly shoved a tax down our throats without asking.

"Everything that is wrong in today's Olympia — broken promises, huge tax increases and startling contempt for the people outside the corridors of power — is completely represented by the gas-tax increase," said KVI radio host John Carlson, one of the measure's prime backers.

The drive to repeal the gas tax even became a pet issue for Grover Norquist, the national anti-tax leader who once said the goal of reducing government was to get it small enough so "I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

These lines have worked so well for years now. Not this time. Tuesday, it appeared voters were siding with the government, though barely.

Maybe the anti-government movement is beginning to run its course. Colorado voters just took their first step away from it in more than a decade, voting to let state government keep $3.7 billion they could have received in tax breaks.

Maybe people didn't like what they saw on TV when a government actually drowned in a bathtub, in New Orleans after the hurricane.

I'm not saying voters here were wrong to clamp down on the government this past decade. A lot of the stuff Carlson says about wasteful spending and misplaced priorities was true.

But the rhetoric that politicians rammed a gas tax down our throats because they're arrogant or blind to our will was garbage, and it's a hopeful sign that voters rejected it. The truth is lawmakers passed this tax because roads like the Alaskan Way Viaduct are crumbling. They'd be derelict if they did nothing about it.

So state government earned back some of our trust. They did it by being honest about their plans and how much it would all cost.

If only the folks at the monorail had thought of trying that.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.