Christine Petchnick
“You have to speak up. The time for staying silent and just going along, those days are over.
We’re a typical middle class family. My dad and grandpa started a small machine shop in 1965. Today, my husband and brother run it together.
People think because we own a business, we must be rich and have millions in the bank, but we just don’t.
Our family owns a commercial property in Sumner, which houses the family business. And, you know, there’s taxes on that and all these little surprise fees.
I mean, we really struggled to keep the family business running through COVID. And it depleted pretty much all of our savings to do that.
Things were starting to turn around, and then the government hit us with, ‘Soon we’re just gonna stop supplying your natural gas.’ Well, there’s another expense on top of expense on top of expense.
To convert the commercial property to all electric, we’re looking at conservatively $150,000 for equipment and labor to install and run new wiring. For my home and my mothers home, we will have to replace our furnaces, water heaters, laundry dryers, and convert our generator to some other type of fuel. And then of course the labor costs. Overall for the residences, we’re looking at $50,000 – $70,000 ballpark figure. I’m thinking ‘there goes my 401(K)’.
I’d probably have to take out a second mortgage, and with interest rates where they’re at right now, that’s not feasible.
They’re just picking low hanging fruit at the expense of the low income and middle class — the people that need those resources the most and who our progressive lawmakers claim to care about.
For the majority of my life, I’ve been like the ‘just roll with it’ type of person. Not a fan of confrontation or sticking my neck out. But this pissed me off to the point where I’m not staying silent anymore.
I like to quote Jean-Luc Picard from the Star Trek movie First Contact, ‘We’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn, here and no further. This far, no further.’
In Washington, the time is now. The line has to be drawn. And it has to be drawn here and now.”
Christine Petchnick
Seattle, Washington