Kudos to King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison for speaking out on an unpopular issue in favor of the people, not the politicians.

I’m talking about her proposing switching the light rail from Interstate 90 to State Route 520. You’d be hard pressed to find a prominent career politician stand up and say this just won’t work, we need to change it now instead of changing it 20 years down the line. But that’s just what Ms. Hutchison did.

This is a prime example of why we need non-career politicians like Susan Hutchison to get elected. I’m sick and tired of hearing elected officials who claim to have our best interests in mind come up with these plans that even a third-grader would find laughable. Yes, putting light rail across 520 would require us to revisit the plan and make expansions, but I think it’s worth it.

House Transportation Chair and Mercer Island Councilwoman Judy Clibborn is quoted as saying, “This is what you get when you have people who haven’t been involved in regional transportation planning.” Well, councilwoman Clibborn, judging by the poor job you and your fellow transportation-committee members have been doing, maybe it’s time we let others take a crack at it. But why is councilwoman Clibborn so adamant about not moving light rail from I-90? Could it be because moving the light rail from I-90 would mean her and her rich friends on Mercer Island would no longer get a light-rail line?

Career politicians like councilwoman Clibborn and Dow Constantine are the real problem. They spend all their time telling us that they know what problems we are facing and how to deal with them, yet they are so far removed from “regular people” that if you took away their pollsters and political analysts, I doubt they’d even know where to find a regular person. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of politicians telling me what the problem is instead of asking me the problems I see.

Matthew Kirchner, Bothell