Tim Eyman sent me and several others several copies of the same e-mail this morning. The letter, with a 6MB 84-page attachment, reported that someone is plotting to add to local car tab fees without consulting voters.

The e-mail helped make it impossible for me to send e-mails to anyone because the duplicates filled my in box. I had to open a few of the PDFs to find out that I received about 66MB more than I needed. I’ll complain more about that later.

Eyman went down a list of his initiatives and how they fared in Kitsap County. That’s all fine and good. His initiatives passed here.

But the attached document is from Bainbridge Island, where Eyman initiatives regularly fail.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a fair question to ask why a community would be considering raising the tabs without a vote.

Apparently that is exactly what is happening. I talked to BI City Councilman Bill Knobloch and he said the council is looking at the option of raising the MVET. He said the council is split on the idea, generally.

On the second question, it’s his sense that the majority on the council would not send it to Bainbridge voters. Not consulting voters would be a big mistake, he said. “I wouldn’t want to impose any tax without going to the voters,” he said.

During the 2007 legislative session lawmakers gave local counties and cities the option of raising MVET (car tabs) by $20 without a vote. The idea has seen the light of discussion in the county, but the sense at the end was that the county wouldn’t do it without a vote. There are no plans at this point. In Bremerton the idea is still a going concern there, but based on the temperatures I took before I stopped covering the city there is little appetite for raising tabs without a vote.

As for the e-mail, county commish Josh Brown received several copies as well. He responded:

Tim,

First of all, Kitsap County is not pursuing an increase to car tabs.

Second, I have a dozen emails from you in my inbox with exactly the same message. Please help make government more efficient by not wasting precious space on public servers with identical messages. The first email would suffice.

Warm regards, Josh Brown

Eyman responded to Brown:

We have a huge email list of supporters, media outlets, and elected officials throughout the state. As a result, we have to break it into chunks so everyone on our extensive list receives the email.

I don’t doubt the huge e-mail list, but his response to Brown made no sense to me. I wrote and told him so:

Mr. Eyman,

I don’t think you understand what happened. I received the same e-mail with
the same attachment a dozen or so times. I don’t know what you thought you
broke up. The attachment is an 84-page document that doesn’t amount to any
plan to increase car tab fees.

Well, the document does show it’s being included in the city’s conversation, but that doesn’t amount to a plan. My hunch is some tipster on Bainbridge Island sent him the attachment and gave him all of our e-mails. (I was half-right on that. He was tipped off, but he found the e-mails on our Web site.) I receive regular letters from Eyman, but for some in this newsroom it was the first time they’d ever heard from him.

Eyman believes clogging up my e-mail box to the point that it was temporarily unable to send is not a problem for me. He sent the following response:

In the ‘bcc’ line of each email that you received was a subset of email
addresses for supporters, elected officials, and media outlets around the
state.

There’s a button on your keyboard labeled “Del” and you can use it to delete
11 of the emails, leaving one on your computer to read and review. 🙂

No, not 🙂 You wasted my time, Tim. Major }:(

Sadly, my eyebrows really do look like that if I don’t shave them. 🙂