King County is holding an all-mail Primary and Special Election on August 16, 2011. Ballots were mailed yesterday.
The ballot includes a question, Referendum 1, which relates to the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement.
Referendum 1 asks Seattle voters to approve or reject Section 6 of Ordinance Number 123542. If approved, Section 6 would authorize the Seattle City Council “to give notice to proceed, beyond preliminary design work, with three agreements concerning the State’s proposal to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel.”
Section 6 states:
The City Council is authorized to decide whether to issue the notice referenced in Section 2.3 of each Agreement. That decision shall be made at an open public meeting held after issuance of the Final Environmental Impact Statement.
A group called Let’s Move Forward is campaigning to approve Referendum 1, and a group called Protect Seattle Now is campaigning to reject Referendum 1. (Disclosure note: Let’s Move Forward advertises on My Green Lake.)
Two Green Lake residents have provided us with op-eds about Referendum 1. Grant Twitchell is a supporter of Referendum 1, and Gary Manca is a proponent of a reject vote.
From Grant Twitchell:
I remember where I was when the Nisqually earthquake hit more than 10 years ago. And the two days afterwards, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct was closed, do you recall the traffic? It was crazy, blocked up for miles. That started our elected leaders thinking about replacing the Viaduct. And ten years later, we’re finally ready to move ahead with a solution. Almost. Now we need to approve Ref. 1.
Ref. 1 is about process: the process the City Council will use to move ahead with agreements about utility relocations and other logistical stuff with the state Department of Transportation as it begins building a downtown tunnel to replace the Viaduct. The City Council approved the agreements by 8-1, but Mayor McGinn vetoed them. The City Council voted again by 8-1 to override the mayor’s veto. So Mayor McGinn helped launch a paid signature drive to put the issue on the ballot, and here we are. Personally, I believe in representative democracy, not the Tim Eyman approach to using the ballot box to delay and stonewall. For lots of people, that’s reason enough to approve Ref. 1. But there are lots of others.
For us Greenlake residents, there is much at stake. With a downtown tunnel, we can get from the Woodland Park Zoo to SODO in 14 minutes. That same trip would take about a half-hour under Mayor McGinn’s idea to replace the Viaduct with nothing. To hear his side, Mayor McGinn wants to put 110,000 cars on the street and handle the gridlock with street improvements, closing downtown exits on I-5 and vague transit investments. But there are some big problems here. Mayor McGinn has no champion for his plan in Olympia, no state funding, no state-wide coalition, no political consensus. He wants you to reject Ref. 1 but he has no plausible alternative. What we get is more talk, and that’s the last thing we need.
In fact, we’ve already had plenty of talk. A group of 29 community stakeholders recommended moving forward with a downtown tunnel. They met for more than a year in a completely transparent process. If you want to see the discussion, it’s all archived on the Seattle Channel website. The Final Environmental Impact Statement is an exhaustive document that evaluated dozens of potential alternatives, thousands of public comments and hundreds of technical reports and analysis. The report showed that nearly 60,000 vehicles will use the downtown tunnel. Imagine if Mayor McGinn had his way and those cars and trucks were on the streets. It’d be gridlock, for cars, trucks and buses. We’d choke on fumes.
The opponents of Ref. 1 have a lot of explaining to do. Like why Tim Eyman supports them so strongly and why they’ve betrayed their environmental priorities. And why they repeatedly cite traffic numbers from an appendix in the Final Environmental Impact Statement that wasn’t produced with the same rigor and standards as the rest of the massive report. It’s cherry picking to make a point, and voters have a right to be angry.
This is a confusing measure, but here are the fundamentals: If we approve Ref. 1, the City Council can go ahead and move forward with tunnel agreements. We finally put an end to ten years of process. We preserve an important transportation corridor through our city. And we begin to build a waterfront that connects Seattle with Elliott Bay. It’s been a long time coming. Let’s make it happen. Let’s approve Ref. 1.
From Gary Manca:
Gary Manca
Green Lake is a wonderful neighborhood, and I have been happy for the four years that I have lived here. It feels like a place to get away from the hubbub of downtown, while easy connections to jobs and the rest of the city make it a convenient place to call home.
One of the neighborhood’s critical transportation veins, however, could be changed in a way that damages Green Lake. The lake won’t go anywhere, of course, regardless of how the Alaskan Way Viaduct is replaced. But the affordability and quality of life here are at risk, which is why I invite my neighbors to join me in voting to Reject the Tunnel and Reject Referendum 1 (ballots are due on August 16).
This is already not the most affordable community, and I am worried that the risky deep-bore tunnel, with a finance plan that’s patched together with Band-Aids and voodoo, will price out me and my neighbors.
It starts with tolls. The $4.2 billion tunnel has a $700 million funding gap before construction would even begin, and the State wants to impose tolls to close $400 million of the deficit. The tolls would cost $3 southbound, $4 northbound, or $1,750 per year for the average commuter from Green Lake.
Next are property taxes. To contribute its pledged $300 million and fill the rest of that gap, the Port of Seattle would use property taxes levied on Green Lake homeowners.
Worst is our liability for the inevitable cost overruns. A state law caps the gas-tax money at $2.4 billion and puts Seattle taxpayers on the hook for cost overruns. Tunnel projects go over budget by 34% on average, and we all know about Boston’s infamous Big Dig.
This unaffordable plan is simply not a real option for replacing the Viaduct.
Most of us do not object to paying taxes for services and infrastructure that work—libraries, public safety, parks, roads, bus service, light rail. But the tolled tunnel does not work for Green Lake.
As you might expect, most drivers would not want to pay the pricey tolls, and so lots more drivers would exit 99 on Denny and new intersections built on Aurora. As the State says in a recent report, “traffic queues are expected to increase at the on and off-ramps near the tunnel portals during peak commute hours, which will increase congestion and reduce speeds.” The end result? The morning commute into downtown from Green Lake on 99 would take 35% more time.
Do you commute to South Lake Union via the University Bridge and Eastlake? Picture more congestion. The traffic diverting from the tolled tunnel would be so bad that 93,500 cars would clog South Lake Union streets, which is 15% more than if we simply tore down the Viaduct tomorrow and replaced it with nothing.
The tolled tunnel makes it harder to live in Green Lake while taking advantage of the nearby city.
Not only that, but the project sucks away billions of dollars in transportation funding, and yet it doesn’t include a dime for fixing our neighborhood’s streets or for permanent bus service. We deserve better at a time when potholes make our roads look like a moonscape and King County Metro is so broke that it plans to reduce or eliminate the 16, 26, and 82 bus routes that pass through Green Lake, with other cuts systemwide.
Tunnel supporters ask voters to turn a blind eye to the project’s staggering cost risks, the congestion, and the danger to our other, more important priorities. They try to change the subject or even ask the voters to get mad at other people.
Green Lake is too wonderful of a neighborhood to give in to the misdirection. If we have to replace the Viaduct, then the residents of Green Lake should get an alternative that we can afford and that improves the transportation system here locally and also between the neighborhood and the city.
The upcoming referendum (ballots drop this week) is our opportunity to send a message that we do not want this bad deal for Green Lake. I ask you to join me and Reject Referendum No. 1, and Reject the Tolled Tunnel.
What are your thoughts on Referendum 1? Please leave your comments below.
