Elevate People, Not Boondoggles!

ELEVATE PEOPLE, NOT BOONDOGGLES!

As consultants and construction contractors in the Chamber of the 1% salivate over the prospect of spending further millions of your money to lay the groundwork to grab hundreds of millions more, it’s time for the people of Salem to send a clear message to every elected official within 100 miles:

It’s an obscenity to pour money down the planning rathole for a project that backers are trying to sell with an ever-changing rationale but will never be built, in a city that is so apathetic to the actual residents’ needs that it doesn’t even provide weekend bus service.

We’re against blowing four to eight hundred million dollars on an enormous elevated boondoggle. 

What are we for instead? It’s simple: we are for ELEVATING what’s right, not what’s wrong.

·      We support elevating people, not pork-barrel bridges.

·      We support elevating transit in Salem above the level of a third-world country.

·      We support elevating transparency over the backroom, backscratching maneuvers by politicians conspiring with their campaign funders, the maneuvers that produced this camel pretending to be a racehorse.

·      We support elevating honest government instead of the profits of the CH2M-Hills and the others sucking at the teat of a giant pork project.

·      We support elevating health for people by spending on projects that support biking and pedestrians, not just drivers.

·      We support elevating downtown Salem businesses, not the ones in Keizer and beyond West Salem.

·      We support elevating the needs of the “bridgehead” neighborhoods over the profits of the contractors who want to destroy those neighborhoods.

For all those reasons and more, that is why we support elevating the “Salem River Crossing” just enough to drop it in the trash can and move on to more important things.