(This article was originally published on InvestigateWest and has been reprinted under an agreement.)
Acting on international calls to freeze fossil fuel infrastructure, citizen activists working with environmental justice groups and Indigenous nations are pushing local governments to rewrite the rules for building everything from airports and gas stations to industrial zones.
“We were here before the airport was. They forget that,” says Rosario-Maria Medina, a community activist in the South Seattle neighborhood of Georgetown, just north of bustling Boeing Field. When Seattle’s first commercial airport opened in 1928, Georgetown had been a vibrant community for more than half a century.
This weekend’s “long read” comes from investigative journalism organization InvestigateWest, and it dives into why childcare services are so expensive in Washington — and across the nation.
Childcare in our state can be ruinously expensive for families, costing anywhere from $11,000 per year for a 4-year-old in a program designed to meet the state’s minimum standards, to over $30,000 for an infant in a “high quality” childcare center. But if you think providers are raking in the money, you’d be wrong; most of them are operating on thin margins.
(This article originally appeared on InvestigateWest and has been reprinted with permission.)
Marissa Reyes still doesn’t understand why her signature would cause her August 2020 Benton County primary ballot to be tossed out.
A letter from the county elections office challenging her signature came to her house in her hometown of Prosser. But Reyes had left for New York, where she had just finished college. Confused, neither Reyes nor her parents had the time to figure it all out before her ballot was rejected.
“I definitely felt annoyed and a little apathetic, but definitely not surprised,” Reyes recalled.
