03/23/2006: "County Asks Governor to Save Capron Funds"

In a last day attempt to retain future increases in the Capron Funds for San Juan County, the County Council sent a letter to Governor Gregoire this week asking her to line-veto parts of a bill that is due to be signed by her this week. If the bill is signed has presented, the County is expected to loose as much as one to two million dollars a year in future revenue from the fund.

The letter points out that while the Council "recognize that representative of other areas of the State may see this fund as a special treatment"it is important to know that "For 85 years the money provided by the Capron Act has allowed San Juan County to provide good highway access to state facilities and to serve the millions of state tourists that visit our beautiful area".

Administrator Goldsmith and Public Works Director Jon Shannon had brought the matter to the Council last week, and urged them to write a letter to the governor asking her to strike the lines that would effectively cut the funds to SJC, and would send them to the ferry system to offset costs of operation. But Councilman Ranker urged caution, saying "We need to pick our battles", and this is a battle we may not want , "because our own representatives, and others who have been helpful to SJC in the past, all support the bill. "

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On Tuesday of this week, Goldsmith was back with a draft letter for the Council to sign, asking the governor to line-veto parts of the bill. But again Ranker was very hesitant to make the legislators mad by signing it, expressing concern that Shannon was correct when he said this act is "the first piercing of the armor protecting the Capron funds", and it was not wise to "'expletive' the legislators off", but Goldsmith told the Council it would be a mistake to remain silent, and that in his experience legislators will sometimes go along with a bill even if they don't agree with it, so they to receive feed-back, adding that we should not assume a letter is going to upset them. Lichter said he wanted to go forward with the letter and Ranker agreed with Goldsmith, and that the letter should be sent. A final draft was reviewed by Chair Lichter, and the letter was faxed to the office of the Governor on Tuesday night. The Council should have news on the outcome this week.

The issue has to do with future money collected by the state that, because of the so-called Capron Act, is normally turned over to San Juan County and the Town to be used for our road maintenance and construction. The logic behind the 85 year old bill is that since we do not have state roads, and since the money is collected for repair and building of state roads, our county should be able to use our portion of it, for our county roads.