Costs have more than doubled to $204 million for the latest Mercer Mess fix, and the city has about three-quarters of that available.
And while there is an ongoing debate about whether the proposal would actually improve travel times, at least the Seattle City Council had taken a prudent course of withholding the available money until the balance was in hand.
That changed on Feb. 23 in a 6-3 vote, based on a faulty assumption that the rest of the money would come from the state Legislature's distribution of the federal stimulus package.
But both Mayor Greg Nickels and council transportation committee chair Jan Drago already knew that was a false premise before the vote, according to House transportation committee chairwoman Judy Clibborn (D-41st District).
Alex Fryer, a spokesman for Nickels, said the state committee waited until the last minute to cut out a $50 million appropriation for Mercer Street and a $25 million appropriation for the Spokane Street viaduct project. The city thought it had a real shot at the money, according to Fryer.
To begin with, he said, Gov. Christine Gregoire was highly supportive of both projects. So were the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington and labor organizations, Fryer said. "So there's a lot of folks coming up and saying we could approve this."
John Coney, a citizen activist who is a member of both the Queen Anne Community Council and the Uptown Alliance in Lower Queen Anne, supports both projects and testified in favor of them in Olympia.
"I think the Spokane Street viaduct improvement project and Mercer Street are essential to Seattle freight mobility and general transportation," he said. But Coney had also heard the day of the City Council vote that the two projects weren't going to make the state cut, he said.
Queen Anne Community Council member Kirk Robbins is not a supporter of the Mercer project, which he describes as "urban renewal masquerading as a transportation project." He was also highly critical of the mayor's role in the vote. "Charitably, you could call it bluffing," Robbins said.
State Rep. May Lou Dickerson (D-36th District) is on the House transportation committee, and she is also highly critical of the Mercer Street project. "I think that is overly expensive and comes close to a boondoggle," she said.
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), spoke to the House committee and said the agency has come up with a way to improve travel times and reduce congestion on the Mercer project, Dickerson said. "But they haven't shown me that data. I'm still skeptical."
Council member Nick Licata's staff used an earlier SDOT study on the Mercer Street project to show that not only would travel times not improve very much, they would actually get worse in some cases under the proposed fix.
"There are different levels of optimism about getting money for Mercer or anything else for that matter," Licata said. Some, like mayor Nickels, are very optimistic, the council member noted: "I'm not sure that optimism is shared by the rest of the council."
It has been suggested that the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) might be a source of funding for the Mercer and Spokane streets projects, and that's partially true, said Rick Olsen, the PSRC's director of Governmental Relations and Communication.
The PSRC got $78 million from the state and has earmarked $15 million of that for the $25 million Spokane Street project, he said. But using $50 million of that money for Mercer Street is a stretch, Olsen said.
Still, the four-countywide agency has been very supportive of redeveloping the South Lake Union area, he said. The PSRC even kicked in some money for the South Lake Union Streetcar, Olsen added.
Clibborn, the state transportation chair, noted that the committee only awards money to state projects and to federally recognized pass-through organizations such as the PSRC. And a short list of approved projects was available on Feb. 18, she said. "It would have been public at that point."
Nickels was also in Clibborn's office on Feb. 18, "and we talked about why it wasn't in there and why," she said of state funding for the Mercer and Spokane street projects.
The mayor didn't have much to say about the news, Clibborn added.
Furthermore, Clibborn said, she called City Council transportation chairwoman Drago on Sunday, Feb. 22, the day before the council vote. "And I told her there was absolutely no money for Spokane Street and Mercer in the state package," Clibborn said.[[In-content Ad]]
