MONDAY: City Council gets West Seattle Bridge briefing

Reminder – if you’re interested in hearing the latest on the West Seattle Bridge firsthand, you’ll want to watch as the City Council gets briefed tomorrow (Monday) morning (as announced last Monday). Though the bridge has been discussed by the council in various meetings, mostly related to funding, this is the council’s first full bridge briefing since a Transportation Committee meeting in August. It’s scheduled for 9:30 am; the agenda includes the planned slide deck and the recently released Cost-Benefit Analysis. You’ll be able to watch live via the Seattle Channel, online or cable.

Blbl November 8, 2020 (6:47 pm)

Ooooooh…more talking!

Brian November 8, 2020 (6:49 pm)

Less chat, more hat. Give me a bridge.

Mj November 8, 2020 (7:25 pm)

Blbl – if we were homeless instead of bridgeless the City would have already found the money!

Chemist November 8, 2020 (9:39 pm)

It’s disappointing that the slide deck doesn’t have SDOT making a pitch in support of Petersen’s budget item to boost the bridge maintenance budget by $24M to the minimum recommended by the recently-completed audit. When it was talked about in the October 20th council meeting (youtube) , councilmembers who spoke weren’t exactly enthusiastic about fulfilling that recommendation from the city’s own audit and Mosqueda, the budget chair, scoldingly called bridge maintenance “car-centric” spending. My understanding is that it’s a significantly larger up-hill battle of identifying cuts to fund your bill if it’s not in the omnibus budget package that will comes on Tuesday. The slide deck for Monday already says “Low Bridge Repair/Improvements $14-19M” which sure sounds like spending under $10M/yr has left bridges shortchanged. If the folks at SDOT don’t have a budget sufficient to tackle big maintenance projects then they continually feel pigeonholed into the tiny patches and big things, like locked bearings (the only single factor SDOT has named out of lots of contributors to cracking), get put off for many years. Bridge maintenace isn’t the shiny, headline-grabbing budget spend, but it’s the solid, right thing to do to help the city function and nobody with aspirations for public office should be ignoring the city’s audit identifying the issue.

Can't solve problems you don't give a budget November 9, 2020 (11:38 am)

Agree! You can’t solve a problem you are not willing to address. Being “car-centric” is not the near-term problem.

FixTheBridge November 9, 2020 (8:24 am)

Its been really interesting as a transplant from CA to watch Seattle go through this bridge issue. I think Seattle is a unique place in so far as for whatever reason this city seems to believe meeting and discussion is the same as doing something. With all due respect Seattle has become a strangely dysfunctional government and the citizens seem to support it. Seattle needs to make a decision and get to work. When will enough time have been wasted talking and discussing? A bridge that can be fixed needs repair. Fix it. How is this even a tricky problem? Very odd.

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