Imagine the scene of a placid bullock standing quietly tethered in the middle of the dense jungle clearing. The thick forest around the animal is teeming with the sounds of predators moving stealthily in the bush. Hungry eyes glitter in the jungle, watching the critter quietly munching the lush grass.

That bullock is you, the West Seattle and North Highline taxpayer.

Those predators gathering in the bush eyeing your bank account are city, county, state and even federal politicians and bureaucrats. They hope to, one by one, coax you near their hiding place in the thicket the pounce and chew your wallet away.

The upshot will be a long line of taxing proposals to build the viaduct, to rebuild the 520 Bridge, to run some kind of transit across the I-90 floating bridge. On and on and on. All of the projects are worthy, but there are simply too many to do all at once.

A major problem is that government for years has ignored our road and bridge infrastructure. Now the list of really major needs is longer than a policians election year wish list. That viaduct need somebody to make some decision about what is to be done with it: refit, rebuilt or whatever.

That tunnel idea, we believe, died forever last week because of what happened in Boston. Boston's Big Dig, the nation's largest highway project, which took 15 years to complete at a cost of nearly $15 billion, became the focus of public outrage and political finger-pointing in Massachusetts when a 2.5-ton slab of concrete broke loose from a tunnel ceiling and crashed on a car, instantly killing a 38-year-old woman in the passenger seat as her husband drove. The accident will mean that no politican in Seattle or Washington state will want to touch a waterfront tunnel, no matter how unfair that judgement is.

Until this state comes up with a unified and a rational list of transportation projects, including buses, ferries, roads, bridges and all similar infrastructure, the voters will continue to be fed a one-by-one proposal to raise taxes to build each one at a time. The voters, we believe, will rebel and turn all of these ideas down, regardless of their importance to the infrastructure.

West Seattle needs a viaduct, rebuilt or replaced. However, folks in Bellevue, Medina and Hunt's Point will believe the 520 Bridge is more important. It will take some major planning to get both done and add all the other needs.

We hope the voters will see the way to pushing the politicans into some rationalization of our need and and stop playing us taxpayers like a herd of placid bullocks to kill one at a time.