We won’t have Port of Bremerton Commissioner Bill Mahan to kick around anymore after the end of his term this year.

Once the port district commissioners decided to use the special six-year property tax levy to pay most of the cost of expanding the Bremerton marina, the port’s every move has been subjected to much greater scrutiny.

Mahan was re-elected in November 2005 on the same day the port commissioners approved creation of the industrial development district (IDD) that would encompass the new marina.

At the first port district meeting in January 2006, the commissioners stated their intention to impose the six-year levy to fund the marina — but not so loud as to have anyone hear who might oppose the tax.

The 90-day period in which signatures of registered voters could have been gathered on a petition to place the tax on the ballot for voter approval or rejection lapsed in April 2006, and the tax was levied beginning in 2007.

Ironically, one of Mahan’s last acts as port commissioner will be voting to levy this tax in the final year of its six-year duration.

His last term in office as port commissioner began with the IDD and its property tax and will end with imposition of the despised tax one more time.

With his departure the last commissioner who had been in office when the IDD tax began will have left office.

Only one tried for re-election — and lost — in 2007.

After a long political career, Mahan undoubtedly has much to look back on and fondly remember.

And there are probably some things he would like to have done differently.

As he said in the notice of his decision to retire posted on the port district’s Web site, he entered politics in 1964 wanting to use government’s power to make things better rather than engage in a “philosophical debate” about what government should or should not do.

This attitude apparently served him well until the significant IDD property tax increase showed up on the tax bills received by port district taxpayers in February 2007.

He couldn’t have served so many terms in office as a Kitsap County commissioner and later as a Port of Bremerton commissioner if he had not been doing an acceptable job of making things better.

Unfortunately, one big mistake can cancel the effect of a lot of “attaboys.”

Tiptoeing past the taxpayers’ right to put that IDD tax on the ballot for voter approval or rejection back in 2006 was one big mistake.

Maybe the expanded Bremerton marina will turn out to be a worthwhile use of the port’s remaining special IDD levy authority, but it won’t be clear until the economy recovers.

And maybe voters would have agreed that the new marina should be built and would have approved this use of the last six-year IDD levy authority had the question been on the ballot in 2006.

We’ll never know whether there would have been a successful petition drive to place the issue on the ballot, or whether voters would have then approved the tax increase.

We can only know that the unpleasant surprise caused a significant and long-lived backlash in the community that affected attitudes toward the port district and in some cases about tax burdens in general.

Surely one lesson to be learned from this experience is that no effort to “engage” the voters is complete if it involves waiting to see if they find out on their own they can put a tax question on the ballot.

Mahan had a long and successful career in elected office for the simple reason that most of us want our representatives to do as he ordinarily did — exercise good judgment in using government’s power to make things better.

Most of us want to know what our elected officials are doing so we can decide whether to reelect them, not so we can tell them every move to make.

But when a significant tax increase is subject to the right to petition to place it on the ballot for voter approval or rejection, it seems likely that most voters would want to be told by their elected officials before it’s too late.

Bob Meadows is a Port Orchard resident.