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In Our View: Cheers & Jeers

All-day kindergarten has many benefits; coin-operated parking meters outdated

The Columbian
Published: December 31, 2016, 6:03am

Cheers: To all-day kindergarten. In 2007, the state Legislature required all public schools to offer all-day kindergarten by the 2017-18 school year. That phase in is nearly complete. A recent visit by Columbian reporter Kaitlin Gillespie to Meadowlark Clark’s class at Tukes Valley Elementary quickly reveals some of the benefits of having more class time. Compared with the half-day kindergarten she used to teach, Clark is able to spend much more time on foundational skills, such as reading and math, that will help her young pupils do better, first in primary school and then throughout their academic careers. There’s more time for structured play, too, along with music, art and learning to interact with peers and adults.

Because these children are at the start of their public school journey, it will be years before the success of the program can be measured. But with an abysmal 78.1 percent statewide graduation rate in May 2015, there is plenty of room for improvement.

Jeers: To old-fashioned parking meters. Coin-operated meters are a bygone technology. You need a pocketful of coins to buy more than a few short minutes of parking, and who carries cash these days? And like anything else mechanical, meters can jam, and they need to be serviced regularly, including sending a city employee out to empty each meter’s coin box and take the coins to the bank.

That’s why we prefer the parking kiosks that take credit cards, and other innovative services like the city of Vancouver’s Parkmobile digital service. Parkmobile has been available on a trial basis on about 100 downtown Vancouver meters for the past two years. The city plans to expand it to other parking meters in 2017 and 2018. Users who register with Parkmobile can pay digitally using credit and debit cards or PayPal and a smart phone. The upgraded meters each have a sticker identifying them. And the first 20 minutes is still free!

Cheers: To expanded C-Tran services. The transit agency’s recently adopted 2017-18 budget calls for 20,000 additional service hours to be added to fixed routes over the next two years, without raising tax rates or rider fees. The money will come from fares and increased sales tax collections due to the county’s growing economy. How the expanded service will play out is yet to be determined. The transit agency might expand service hours or frequency on some routes, or it could add routes, or some combination of those choices. A C-Tran spokeswoman said a new park-and-ride lot serving east Vancouver commuters will be studied, too. Most of the service improvements won’t happen until 2018, a year after the new Fourth Plain Bus Rapid Transit line opens.

Jeers: To Washington’s outdated transportation funding system. Anyone who has driven the state’s highways for the last 25 years or more can see how the pavement has deteriorated and the traffic has built. The way the state funds road maintenance and construction is part of the problem. We’ve relied on a per-gallon gasoline tax, but greater fuel efficiency, and even the advent of autos that don’t use gas, has reduced the amount of revenue available per mile driven. The problem will only get worse as gasoline-powered cars become more efficient and auto-makers turn out more alternative fuel vehicles.

So the state transportation commission is recruiting 2,000 drivers from all over the state to participate in a study that replaces the gas tax with a per-mile “road user charge.” A charge of 2.4 cents per mile is expected to be revenue neutral for the state, and for the first time drivers of Priuses and pickups would pay the same to drive from Vancouver to Seattle. By comparison, the state gas tax is currently 49.4 cents per gallon, so the winner here would be the owner of a bigger vehicle who drives it less.

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