You know what today is ? Fangsgiving !

[unclevlad]

6 minutes ago, Old Man said:

 

Yeah, what's up with the ferries up there?  Who's responsible for breaking all the ferries at the same time?

 

Well if you knew Cancer was coming, you'd put out a Gone Fishing sign too..........

[Cancer]

Frankly, the Washington State Ferry system has been a victim of ... Politics, and I am putting this here because it's germane here, and further discussion should go to the inevitable politics thread if it's needed.

 

The legislature has been cheap.  They've put off replacing boats as they age out, and they haven't kept ferry worker and work arrangements competitive with other jobs.  The Coast Guard has been partly staffing some boats over the last couple years, IIRC.

 

Unfortunately, this is always an east-versus-west (and approximately GOP-vs-Dem) issue in this state.  It's a large capital project to buy a new set of boats.  But those boats only service the Puget Sound area, so even if the ferry system runs a profit over the long haul (and I don't know at all if it does), the rest of the state sees this as a big budget hit that only benefits a limited part of the state.  It is always tempting to defer replacement/expensive episodic maintenance (both for the dollar outflow and the difficult political discussions that accompany such), and that deferral has gone on for too long.  It is not the only such thing to have suffered such a problem; for example, we had a major bridge failure on I-5 a couple years back that also came from overly deferred maintenance.

 

There are other associated political problems surrounding non-military shipbuilding of which I am only dimly aware; I have heard it alleged that this is due to the Jones Act, but I am also deeply suspicious of those arguments because at least some of them come from sources I have come to absolutely disbelieve, and now we really are off into politics-land so I will stop here.

Edited December 12, 2023 by Cancer