We haven’t yet heard of any plans for a big-splash formal announcement, but it had been promised time and time again that the decision on a replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct‘s “mile in the middle” Central Waterfront section would be made by year’s end. That’s a little over 37 hours away. Still enough time to put yourself on the record, suggests Le’a Kent – she’s the West Seattleite who spoke most loudly on behalf of the peninsula at the public forum two weeks ago (as we reported here). She e-mailed WSB this morning to suggest sharing decisionmakers’ e-mail addresses one more time — saying, “I realize there is not complete agreement from all West Seattleites about what the decision should be, but I think we need to get our voices out there” — so here are some contact methods/addresses for starters (let us know if you have one to add):

Governor Gregoire, it’s a web form:
www.governor.wa.gov/contact/default.asp

King County Executive Ron Sims
ron.sims@kingcounty.gov
(If you have a Twitter account, you can send him a 140-characters-or-less note at @ronsims)

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels
greg.nickels@seattle.gov

Click ahead to read what Le’a sent. If you cc us on yours (editor@westseattleblog.com), we’ll add it too. (1:11 pm, just added one, but first thing after the “jump” is from Le’a)

Executive Sims and Mayor Nickels:

Both viaduct choices currently on the table are bad. Neither solves the
problems the stakeholders set out to solve, which is: how do we transport
people and goods in the region while not degrading Seattle’s waterfront
further. The option preferred by the stakeholders, who actually engaged with
these problems for about a year, was an option with a tunnel as well as
surface and transit improvements and changes to I-5. I don’t see why this
isn’t the preferred option now.

The elevated option fails to take advantage of this opportunity to improve
downtown and the waterfront.

The current surface/transit option is not acceptable because it cannot
maintain capacity for the movement of people and goods. Although transit
times through downtown are said to increase by “only” 15 minutes, the
upstream impacts in Seattle’s westside neighborhoods (Ballard, Magnolia,
Fremont, West Seattle) are likely to increase commute times much more for
residents of those areas. When we are trying to encourage city density and
infill development, it makes no sense to strangle these neighborhoods by
forcing traffic through the bottleneck of downtown Seattle. Doing so is the
transportation equivalent of suddenly transforming half of Seattle’s
neighborhoods into exurbs. Those of us who live here do so because we wanted
to live in a city. If I wanted to live an hour from Seattle’s neighborhoods,
I’d live in the sprawl on the Sammamish plateau. I don’t.

The surface/transit option is also inadequate in terms of transit
improvements and cost planning–to avoid a situation where buses are stuck
in gridlock traffic, extensive bus lanes and other improvements in the
neighborhoods will be necessary, and those are not included in current
budgeting, artificially reducing the cost of this option. From a review of
the materials on the viaduct website, it also appears that the
surface/transit option only increases long-term transit use in the SR 99
corridor by about 1% over the elevated option. “Transit” is not much more
than a marketing term here.

I want to emphasize that it is not acceptable to adopt the surface/transit
option and then “wait and see” if a tunnel is necessary. That will mean
years of bottlenecks and doubled and tripled commute times for many Seattle
neighborhoods, resulting in loss of businesses and residents, and degraded
communities.

The current choice of options is particularly dismaying because it pits
Seattleites against each other in a completely unnecessary way: either the
neighborhoods and the port suffer (surface/transit option), or downtown
suffers (elevated option). When the stakeholders’ committee went to work, I
assumed that the point was to hash these things out and come up with a
win/win. The committee did that in recommending the hybrid tunnel options.
You should adopt those now.

–Le’a Kent

Added 1:11 pm (thanks for the cc):

Mayor Nickels:

As a resident of West Seattle, I do not belive the current options being considered
are adequate for moving traffic from West Seattle to the rest of the city. I favor
the hybrid option–a tunnel as well as surface and transit improvements and changes
to I-5.

Getting through downtown on I-5 bottleneck right now is miserable, and I hate to
imagine what it would be like without the Hwy 99 option to bypass downtown. The best
solution is one that both bypasses downtown (tunnel) and allows access to the
downtown waterfront (surface and I-5).

Also the snow response here in West Seattle was a disaster and I would certainly
give you a D- as a grade, not a B as you gave yourself. You should have seen my
elderly neighbor in tears, literally, when we brought her a quart of milk and bread
(we had walked a mile through the snow carrying heavy groceries because we couldn’t
move our cars). She had not had fresh food for 5 days because no one could get to
her. You should be embarrassed. My trash is still piled up in my alley too. You are
seriously out of touch with reality if you think the city’s snow response deserves a
“good” grade.

Cindy Burke
West Seattle