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Friday, December 8, 2006
Supreme Court: Deal's a deal
The Washington Supreme Court has correctly turned back assaults on Sound Transit bond revenues and on decades of legal precedence on government's contractual obligations.
At issue was whether a portion of Initiative 776, enacted in 2002, was constitutional.
The initiative survived a state Supreme Court constitutional challenge on other issues in 2004. But the court instructed the trial court to consider whether the initiative's repeal of the motor vehicle excise tax unconstitutionally impaired the contract Sound Transit entered with bondholders, before the initiative was enacted, pledging the MVET revenue to repay $350 million in debt.
The initiative, which repealed the Sound Transit MVET and a $15 county road fee, was sold to voters as a way to rein in the "rogue agency." The biggest result of its passage was to slash city and county road revenues across the state (including $17.5 million a year in King County).
The question that remained was whether, as Justice Barbara Madsen wrote for the majority, "the people, through initiative, have the right to repeal taxes, pledged as security for capital intensive projects such as highways and bridges, when they no longer want to pay such taxes."
The fact that the Washington constitution guarantees that "No ... law impairing the obligations of contracts shall ever be passed" formed the court's obvious guideline.
The majority was right in refusing to blow holes in either Sound Transit funding or long-established jurisprudence.
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