I am more than confused regarding King County’s decision to force $20 from car owners to subsidize Transit.

You are asking car owners who already face high gas prices, tolls on bridges, high-priced parking fees, emission fees, maintenance on their vehicle, car tabs and driver licenses and being stuck in traffic every day watching their gas gauge drop.

I cannot use Transit because it doesn’t take me where I need to go. I cannot believe King County’s thinking that if you own a car, you can afford $20 more than the Transit riders. You are asking people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their retirement benefits and health benefits to ante up for a system we don’t use.

Transit should be able to maintain its own budget, or ante up to subsidize it. If Transit is as valuable as King County says it is, $20 should be a bargain for the riders to come up with. The story, of course, is that low-income residents use the buses and cannot afford the $20.

I am on Social Security, with no COLA, facing rising medical costs, prescription costs, rising utility costs. PSE has had six or seven price increases in the last three or four years, and even with the surplus water we had this year, customers did not get a break.

If transit cannot maintain service within its budget, cuts have to be made internally to solve that problem. No one is helping me pay for my car tabs and expenses. How about licensing bicycles using bike lanes on the streets?

Residents each have their own way of dealing with cutbacks they have suffered with very little help from anyone. We cannot continue to be used like ATM machines.

I would hope taxpayers will get fed up enough to say “that is enough” and refuse to pay these costs being forced on us. We did not create this situation that the federal, state and local governments find themselves in.

– Pat Horn