The governor gets the final say on tunnel vs. new viaduct vs. neither. Here’s a link to tell her what you think she should do. And if you are honked off about city leaders deciding we shouldn’t have a direct say in it, here’s how to e-mail Hizzoner; links to city council members’ e-mail addresses can be found here.
So why do we as citizens of this city need to have a vote on every single project in this city? I thought we elected a city council to do the hard work for us? Democracy is great and all, but Seattle seems to pride itself on making sure we exercise the full definition of democracy anytime something might change. It seems to be our way of keeping things from changing. If we don’t trust the city council to make the hard decision why did we elect them in the first place? Heck why even have a city council?
I am with you on the “we elected them to make the decisions.” However, in this case, there’s a couple complicating factors. One — precedent has been set (refer to sorry history of the now-dead monorail) to let the voters have the final say. If the council had had the you-know-whats to make the right decision on that one, it wouldn’t be dead. (Looks like now more than ever, we’re going to wish we had it!) Also, in this case, they went through the fall saying ‘we’re probably going to let you all vote’ and then at the last minute, when it was crystal-clear that voters would likely say ‘no tunnel’ because of the price tag the way they said ‘no monorail for the same reason, the council members decided ‘oops, never mind, we don’t really need your advice, you’d just be confused anyway ’cause of all those Big Numbers.’ Cmon, we’ve been recognized as one of the brainiest cities in America, I think we can handle the numbers. On the bright side, if we don’t like the way this all shakes out, we can shake THEM out in the years to come.
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