This morning we conclude our city-candidate closeups; we took a look at them all before the primary election, and with voting under way now for next Tuesday’s general election, we’re checking back in with the finalists in five city races – mayor and council. We’ve already looked at mayor (Mike McGinn here, Joe Mallahan here), City Council Position 6 (Nick Licata here, Jessie Israel here) and City Council Position 8 (Mike O’Brien here and Robert Rosencrantz here); then it was Council Position 2 (Richard Conlin here and David Ginsberg here), and we’re concluding now with Position 4.

By Jack Mayne
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

Sally Bagshaw has a long experience working in the public sector, including time as head of the civil division of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, but this is her first run for Seattle elected office.

“The very first thing I am going to do (if elected) is to keep my mouth shut and my ears open so that I know what is going on and I learn what is happening, that I know how the Council operates.”

She, like most candidates, feels the area’s transportation problems are legion.

“The complaint of people all over the city is that you can go north and south, but not east and west,” she says. “Putting additional buses on West Seattle routes as soon as we can afford it seems the right thing to do. Keeping the water taxi seems good, too. But these things are not under the direct jurisdiction of the city. We can certainly advocate for this.”

Bagshaw says she would like to be on the council’s Transportation Committee and wants the city’s transportation system to work better.

“Metro runs the bus system,” she says. “The city is operating the small circulating streetcars and trolleys downtown. It is crazy that you’ve got Metro working independently of what the city needs. I’d like to see much closer relationships between SDOT (Seattle Department of Transportation) and Metro and between the City Council and the County Council. The best run government that I ever worked for was Metro Transit,” she says, but that was when Metro was an independent agency and before it was merged with King County government.

“Metro was a regional transportation agency and it would have taken on light rail had Metro passed on the ballot,” she says. “Metro was lean, it was mean, it was very smart and some of the very smartest managers were working for Metro. I would like to see something like that return.”

She supports the project that will replace the central waterfront section of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

“But it is much more than the tunnel. People will look at the tunnel and say, ‘that is not going to solve our problems’ and they are absolutely right it’s not going to solve our problems. But, it is one piece of a bigger project which will be the grid system, central city access strategy – people are going to be able to move north and south and east and west much more quickly than they are right now bogged down in traffic.”

She says there have been 10 years of study, and she wants the project to move forward and not spend another 10 years debating this.The tunnel construction will permit the viaduct to stay up and operating until the new route is completed.

“All of this delay is going to cost us more money. We can get it moving, move forward and we will get the extra transit. West Seattle is going to get $30 million of additional transit during the construction project, that is already in the budget,” Bagshaw says.

Bagshaw sees a problem with Rapid Ride in West Seattle not going north beyond the Junction. “It must be a cost cutting measure that it did not go up to the Admiral District,” Bagshaw says. “It strikes me that the RapidRide could be more rapid if it served that area.”

Part of the bigger picture project is the two-way Mercer Street project to and says there is already $200 million in construction funds “that are identified already” and notes the city is seeking $50 million in federal money from a federal stimulus grant.

Councilmember Nick Licata wants the money found before the project is started, but Bagshaw maintains “there is not a single public works project in the world that gets started that is fully funded at the front end. What I say about Mercer is that I have lived in this area for over 30 years and the Mercer area has been a disaster any time you want to get somewhere,” she says. “If you want to go east or west, it just slows things down.”

She says the Mercer project is “not simply a freeway – if we want to just go fast, we would build a freeway through there.”

The South Lake Union area is going to be a neighborhood with “as high as 25 thousand new jobs over the next 10 years” and people will need access.

“The Mercer Project is going to bring more transit, more pedestrian connections,” Bagshaw ways. Sounding a bit like a project pitch, she tells us, “Again, it is not just simply Mercer, it is combining Republic, John and Harrison connections, so people can move east and west much more quickly.”

She, like other council candidates, was sharply critical of Mayor Greg Nickels for allegedly telling department heads and city staff to refrain from providing research to Council members or their staffs. This forced the Council to delay some projects as they did their own research. “That was a complete waste of time for the Council and also a waste for the taxpayers,” Bagshaw said.

For those who worry about cost overruns for the tunnel, or any other project, Bagshaw harkens back to her days with the old Metro Transit agency and suggest “bonded projects” be reprised. A bonded project is where there is a design, a bid a build in one unit with one contractor, “not this low bid stuff but actually design it, figure out how it is going to work and ending with a bonded project with a guaranteed maximum cost. That is what we need to do here.” She says that tunnel projects all over the world have been designed and built and come in on time and under budget.

When Bagshaw was asked why there were not people standing up against people who rail about all tunnel projects going over budget, she said, “People are standing up to these people, I am, Conlin is, Rosencrantz is, even Mallahan more.”

She was asked what she would do to be seen by the public as an active City Council member.

“I am going to stay in the neighborhoods and go to those meetings,” Bagshaw says. “I found out on the campaign trail that I very much enjoyed going to those neighborhood meetings and I would hear directly from them, but what I liked better than going to the meetings, I asked who else in your neighborhood are opinion leaders, decision makers?”

She said she would call those people, too, because there are a lot of people who are unsung, who don’t want to go to those meetings.

“The most important network that is going right now is preschool moms,” she says, “there is no better connection I can make. They talk all the time, the are on the phone, on e-mail taking care of their neighborhoods. They are engaged because schools are incredibly important to them.

“I’d go ask a preschool mom what’s going on.”

Sally Bagshaw’s page in the online city Voters’ Guide (text and video) is here. Her campaign website is here.