by Fran Conley
Politicians and the press will be watching this week to see who shows up, and who speaks, at two public meetings on the draft reports to the mayor and the city council from the Nelson Nygaard consultants.
TUESDAY, April 6th – 6:00pm-7:30pm
The Bertha Knight Landes Room, City Hall
600 4th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104
Mayor Mike McGinn will be on hand to discuss the consultant’s draft report, and design options. There will be an opportunity for public comment on the study itself, which will be released earlier on Tuesday.
THURSDAY, April 8, 2010
5:30 p.m. – public comment meeting
Seattle City Hall
Council Chambers, 2nd Floor
600 4th Avenue, Seattle
The city council will listen to public comment on their draft report.
If you can come to these meetings please do so. Your presence lets the politicians know how important this is to you. Also, our comments help to shape the story that is reported by the media. If you’d like to speak, you might emphasize the big picture issues, and make it clear that a few tweaks won’t solve the problems:
- Minor improvements to Option A are not enough. We still won’t have a solution.
- A huge interchange in Montlake and a broad swath across Portage Bay cause too much damage, completely out of proportion. This area has a series of linked recreational green spaces and bays which are unique and irreplaceable, the Arboretum, and dense historic neighborhoods which are critical to the city, and allowing more cars/ larger interchange does too much damage. We need to move more people in less space, doing less damage, hence transit.
- Seattle doesn’t have room for more cars along this corridor. The Arboretum, Montlake, North Capitol hill, and I-5 are already close to capacity. Expansion needs to be in mass transit, bus rapid transit and/or light rail.
- The state will spend $9 billion (including borrowing costs) for the proposed expansion, with no improvement in congestion. Instead, we need to invest in solutions that actually move people where they want to go.
- It’s time to put our priorities where the city and state have said they should be, on preserving our environment, and not build a 1950’s highway which causes further damage.
If you can’t come to the meetings, you can still influence the public discussion by writing comments to articles published online at the Seattle Times, the Stranger, the PI, and other media. Speak your piece; you will influence someone!
At 9:30 am today, City Council will hear a briefing (no public comment taken) from the city’s 520 consultants.
http://www.seattle.gov/council/newsdetail.asp?ID=10616&Dept=28
Seattle City Council meetings are cablecast live on Seattle Channel 21 and Webcast live on the City Council’s website at http://www.seattle.gov/council/
I’ve looked through the 87 page report for the Council’s scope of work that’s about to be discussed. There are few new ideas with promise, and some new bad ideas — such as a redundant drawbridge just for pedestrians and bicycles, when the current one has a sidewalk on either side. Longstanding goals such as a continuous greenbelt connection to the Montlake Playfield (incompatible with the 520 loop ramp), among many others, remain unaddressed. This process has, thus far, failed to adequately address the transit connectivity issue, deferring to a future process. In the meantime, the Council has failed even to identify a way to restore the Montlake bus stops along the highway.
Why is Council focusing on the wrong problems? I have higher hopes for the Mayor’s scope of work; that report is due tomorrow.