Mr. Stern here is one person who has anti-PSRC sentiment, me. I may not be in an elected position to join your fine group, but I do get to vote on some of the members staying in office. The PSRC is leading Kitsap Coutny down a pre-determined path that has been selected by King and Pierce Counties with little thought to what we in Kitsap County want or desire. As Larry says we would get less money by joining Clallam-Jefferson, but I think we would like the direction much better.

It would make more sense to join with Mason, Jefferson, & Clallam Counties and move our effort to the west coast than dealing with the grid lock that King and Pierce County have become. It is to bad we have few if no elected officials who think out of the box. What we have are elected officials who follow the next shiny thing that dangles from King or Pierce County and yell squirrel!

Count me as one who does not support PSRC or those who blindly follow it down the path. I read your 2040 vision and it was a joke for those of us in Kitsap County.

Having represented all the Kitsap Cities except Bremerton at PSRC for one year, and as the alternate representative for 2 years, and serving on its Transportation Project Priority Committee for 2 years, what I strongly disagree with, is that PSRC holds sway over things like our Comprehensive Plans, and has the power to veto them if we don’t comply with the so-called “vision” of the other 3 counties. The problem with this is that both our “vision” and our NEEDS are substantially different than those on the I-5 corridor.

Why Port Orchard voted against the Vision 2040 Transportation plan, was because the entire process seemed to have a predetermined outcome — which is to get us out of our cars. This is envisioned as being accomplished by tolling I-5, I-90 & I-405 (which has already happened), taxing you for every mile you drive with a Vehicle Miles Driven (VMD) Tax, and to turn existing lanes on state roads like Highway 16 and 3 into HOT lanes as has been done on Highway 167. It also advocates for giving municipalities the ability to toll their existing roads — roads that the citizens have already bought and paid for — and maintain with the taxes they already pay. We saw tolling the state’s main and secondary transportation corridors as a serious detriment to future economic development. In his enthusiasm for “regionalism” it appears to me John Powers (on whose board I also sit) may have missed this point.

While light rail and other mass transit solutions such as buses work where there are mass citizenry to use them, Kitsap doesn’t have that kind of population base, and the geography and topography of our population centers make these solutions financially impractical. All one needs to do is look at how Kitsap Transit is struggling to prove that point.

King County is the tail that wags the dog at PSRC, and in my view at least, Kitsap NEEDS to be independent of it, unless it is the desire of the majority of Kitsap residents to allow King County politicians to make the social engineering decisions that determine where, how, and under what conditions we will live here. The problem is — at least right now — is there’s no other viable RTPO to join, and no political will to create the alternative.