Talk About Unfunded Mandates

Toby Nixon says he knows what it's like to be homeless. Thirty-five years ago his dad took him, age 11, and his two younger brothers to a new town, and they didn't have a place to stay until some government agency found them an $8 per night motel room. Toby doesn't say how long they had to wait to get into that motel room. It could have been all of one afternoon. But in his opinion piece last Friday in the P-I Toby does say that for him and his brothers it was all an adventure.

Arrrgh! It was an adventure for him, but he "knows" what its like to be homeless? No, Toby, you don't know. Nobody knows until they had to do it long enough that it wasn't an adventure anymore.

I hear this sort of nonsense all the time: some college kids decide they're going to write a joint term paper on "what it's really like" to be homeless. So they gather up tents and sleeping bags and live outdoors in city parks for a few days or maybe even a couple of weeks. Then they write that it wasn't so bad. It was "all an adventure." "It was nice not to have to do chores for mom for a change."

Now I don't want to disparage anyone's experiences, but when it comes to listening to people say "I know what it's like to be homeless," I have a little rule. I call it the Eight-Week Rule. The rule is simply that if you haven't been continuously homeless for at least eight weeks, I'm not listening. I know the rule is arbitrary. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I draw it at eight weeks. It's based on the theory that it takes eight weeks for some people before they hit "The Wall." I'll explain what "The Wall" is some other time.

But right now I have to talk about HB 1585. The whole reason Toby Nixon, a state legislator, wanted us to know that he knew what homelessness was "like" was so he could justify introducing HB 1585, a bill that would require tent cities which get any public funding to meet standards in line with the state's standards for migrant worker housing. HB 1585 would require, among other things, 7-foot ceilings for all the tents and ceiling-type lighting in each "housing unit".

Sounds great, except for one little catch. The bill establishes standards without providing the means to achieve them. It doesn't say that public funding has to be increased sufficiently to achieve those standards. HB 1585 in fact defines homeless people as temporary workers, even if they are unemployed, and what is the worst, defines the managers of a tent city as equivalent to the landlords of migrant farm workers. No additional funding is provided, the tent city "operators" are supposed to provide the improvements.

But, guess what? Existing tent cities in the Seattle area are self-managed! So Toby Nixon's law requires the homeless to supply themselves with better housing!

What freakin' genius!

I've just learned about some other brilliant legislation being contemplated by Toby Nixon and his Republican friends:

A bill inspired by Toby Nixon's memory of how hard it was for his next door neighbor when she didn't get a pony for Christmas, which would require all 12 year-old girls to save up their lunch money for however long it takes and buy themselves ponies. (For the purpose of this bill, 12 year-old girls will be defined as "farmers.")

A bill to provide health insurance to all citizens. It would do so by defining the term "insurance company" to include all individual citizens. If you're a citizen, you are your own insurance. It's not magic, it's Toby-ic!

A bill to solve transportation problems in Washington State. It would define "Washington State" as Sherman, Nebraska, and "transportation" as a big fat goose. You can eat your transportation, Washington!