Consensus Rejected, or Deep Boredom

You might think that after six years of inaction on the part of City and State government, after two advisory votes by the citizens of Seattle, and after a year-long study in which all the players came to a compromise, the Mayor and Governor would thank the Stakeholders for all their efforts, and get to work implementing their recommended solutions. But you would be wrong. In January 2009, less than one month after the Stakeholders Advisory Committee triumphantly announced its hard-won consensus, the Mayor, County Executive and Governor jointly released a statement endorsing the 4-lane deep bore tunnel as their preferred alternative, substituting their judgment for that of the committee. Our elected leaders patted the people of Seattle on the head, thanked them for their work, and promptly threw their recommendations in the garbage.

How does something like this happen? What makes elected leaders ignore their constituents not once, but twice? Frankly, we don’t really know, because they’re not telling us. A few points can be gleaned, however, from comments made by members of the Stakeholders Advisory Committee. First, representatives for the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center were–despite not being members of the committee–present for all the meetings, and were lobbying hard for their preferred option, the deep bore tunnel. It also seems that pro-capacity groups like the Port of Seattle and BINMIC (the Ballard/Interbay/Northend Manufacturing & Industrial Center) were able to persuade the Downtown Seattle Association and Chamber of Commerce that the State wouldn’t allow a decrease in capacity, and unless they wanted an elevated freeway, they needed to support the Discovery Institute’s tunnel.

We Beg To Differ...

The Memorandum of Understanding between the three governments also states, explicitly, that the Governor and Mayor would support legislative action granting King County a 1% Motor Vehicle Excise Tax to pay for the increased transit mandated by the tunnel plan. Furthermore, the MOU states that $80 Million would be made available from Obama’s stimulus package to help Seattle pay for the Mercer and Spokane street projects, both of which are necessary to fit the tunnel into the existing street grid.

In the legislative wrangling that followed, the MVET concession that brought Ron Sims on board was slashed from the bill, meaning that Metro’s funding, which was supposed to be an integral part of the bill, was once again in serious jeopardy. If that weren’t bad enough, the legislature required–and the leadership accepted–that taxpayers from Seattle would be responsible for all of the project’s cost overruns. Such a requirement is unprecedented in the history of state highway projects, and represents a significant risk for those businesses and individuals who will eventually receive an invoice from the tunnel contractors. It should be noted that even cost overruns from the state-directed parts of the project will be Seattle’s responsibility. Finally, as an added insult, the legislature apportioned exactly zero dollars of President Obama’s Stimulus monies to the City of Seattle, meaning that the State reneged on its promise of $80 Million for Mercer and Spokane streets.

Let me just quickly recap the sequence of events so you can see how absurd this comedy of errors really is. In December 2008, after a year of careful study, knowledgeable Stakeholders developed a citizen-backed and expert-approved Surface/Transit/I-5 solution. One month later in January 2009, the Stakeholders’ recommendations were ignored and dismissed by the three executives who substituted their own judgment for that of the people, foisting the un-vetted and absurdly expensive deep-bore tunnel plan onto the city. Yet even in their plan, each government would pay their own cost overruns, Seattle would get money for Spokane and Mercer streets and King County would get money for transit. But a few months after that, in March of 2009, the Legislature provided Seattle taxpayers with a a “finalized” Deep Bore Tunnel plan in which Seattle gets to pay for everyone’s cost overruns and there’s no money left over for transit.

The Mayor, County Executive and Governor, through the stroke of a pen, committed the people of Seattle, King County and the State of Washington to pay $4.24 Billion for a tunnel that we voted against, that we do not want, and that our informed citizen surrogates ruled out as unfeasible, unwarranted and irresponsibly expensive. We cannot let this happen.