With just weeks remaining until she leaves office, Mayor Jenny Durkan has launched a farewell tour, and tonight it stopped in the West Seattle Junction, with an ice-cream party at Husky Deli.
This also happened to be the one-year anniversary of her announcement that the cracked West Seattle Bridge would be repaired rather than replaced, ending months of suspense. Also at Husky Deli tonight, in fact, was Seattle Department of Transportation director Sam Zimbabwe (a West Seattle resident). At some point one of the businesspeople and community advocates there for her visit asked the mayor about the bridge – she turned and called out loudly across the room, “Sam Zimbabwe assures me it’s on time and on budget!” He affirmed that:
We asked him if there’s any update on the about-to-start repairs beyond what we published last night. Not yet, he said, but he said we can “expect some good news right after Thanksgiving.” The estimate for completion of repairs remains the same as what they said the day of that big announcement one year ago – “mid-2022.” In other topics, the mayor got a warm sendoff from Lora Radford, who herself just left a high-profile job, running the West Seattle Junction Association.
As the video shows, Radford also presented the mayor with a gift reminiscent of her past visits to The Junction, Bakery Nouveau macaronns, which the mayor had bought for one of her sons during a walking tour in February 2018. She had a parting request for West Seattleites tonight: “Let’s give the new mayor every chance to succeed.”
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