Spring 2007 Issue
Alaksan Way Viaduct Debacle
Posted: October 1, 2008
What to Learn from it Conflicted elected officials with no one holding clear authority. Government jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities. A yawning gap between funding needs and available resources.
Sound like the high points of the Alaskan Way Viaduct controversy? Well, these same traits were cited nearly a decade ago as the systemic problems plaguing transportation governance in our state by the Washington State Transportation Blue Ribbon Commission.
In 1999, the bipartisan, high-profile commission was appointed by the Governor and the State Legislature to take an extended look at our collective system for planning, managing, and funding transportation. The commissioners looked, but couldn’t really find a system. What they found instead was a circumstance they described as follows:
“While drivers may not notice it when they cross from one jurisdiction to another, Washington’s transportation system is a patchwork created and maintained by more than 450 governmental entities through processes that have evolved slowly through the years. There isn’t always adequate coordination, and processes that once served important functions have sometimes outlived their usefulness. In some areas, the complexity of the system and the number of players suggest needs for greater simplicity and accountability.”
The situation was summed up more simply by Alan Mulally, then head of commercial airplane production for The Boeing Company and now CEO of The Ford Motor Company. Mulally let it slip to a newspaper reporter that he felt transportation in our state “Sucks.”
Mulally’s analysis wasn’t meant for publication, but published it was, and the wisdom of his word was never more evident than in the political dust-up kicked up by the notion of an advisory vote regarding the preferred manner for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
It is hard to remember when a sitting Seattle Mayor and City Council majority stood farther beyond the pale of support from the editorial pages of the city’s two daily newspapers on an issue of such potential import.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called City Hall’s proposed ballot measure a “sham.” The Seattle Times also ascribed Orwellian motives and urged that “Voters need to pay close attention because some fancy footwork is going on, beginning with the name of the tunnel option, the “Surface/Hybrid Tunnel.”
Times columnist Danny Westneat struck the deepest blow. He compared the sudden appearance of the much cheaper Surface/ Hybrid Tunnel (“so-eco!”) option to the last, desperate attempts to save the Seattle Monorail. Westneat was a Monorail fan and felt betrayed when it fell apart in the hands of bungling elected officials and bureaucrats. He wrote, “This monorailian sales job on the tunnel is making me queasy all over again.”
Governor Christine Gregoire seemed to feel the same. She made the front page of the P-I above-the-fold on January 23 when she said she might not accept the outcome of Seattle’s advisory vote. “I refuse to end up with a Big Dig that starts out at $2 billion and ends up at $14 billion.” Then again, the main thrust of the article was that Gregoire was reversing her earlier position that the vote would be irrelevant, even though she had demanded that such a vote take place in the first place.
NOT making news on January 23, 2007, was the fact that this was also the release date for the final report of the Regional Transportation Blue Ribbon Commission.
This bipartisan, high-profile commission was appointed by the Governor and the State Legislature in 2006 to take an extended look at our system for planning, funding, and managing transportation in our corner of the state. Like the earlier Blue Ribbon Commission, it found more of a circumstance than a system, a situation it described as follows:
“Our current system of transportation governance delivers inadequate results, and will need fundamental systemic change to meet our state’s transportation needs in the future. At this point there is not a single agency in the region with the ability to meet the overall transportation needs of the region. In order to address regional needs, the system has to be structurally ‘re-knit’ at the regional level.”
Where’s Mulally when we need him? The analytic chore fell instead to Seattle Times editorial page editor Jim Vesley, who wrote about the report in his column. The commission is calling for a complete overhaul of how we approach transportation, with a recommendation for a new agency that would plan, prioritize, and manage transportation projects and services throughout King, Snohomish, Pierce, and Kitsap Counties.
Vesley thinks this is a nice idea, but doubts it will ever happen because there is so much opposition to it. And where does the opposition come from? The grassroots? Nope. Vesley wrote that he put the question about the opposition to Blue Ribbon Commission co-chair Norm Rice, former mayor of Seattle.
“Rice said county executives won’t like it, mayors probably won’t like it, existing transit agencies and officials elected to them probably won’t like it. In other words, those who won’t like it are the same folks that have brought us to our current state of transportation planning.”
Vesley’s column appeared under the headline, “MELTDOWN: THE REGION HAS NO CLOTHES.”
It would be nice if a growing cadre of elected leaders saw it as their legacy to leave behind a transportation system that better serves the public. Right now, that’s not the road we’re heading down.
