- WSDOT
- Council Member Tom Rasmussen has a mixed record as chair of the transportation committee.
âHalle-fucking-lujah.â
Thatâs just one of the words I heard today while asking around about Council Member Tom Rasmussenâs decision not to seek re-election.
It came from Roger Valdez, the director of Smart Growth Seattle, who in recent years has lobbied the council in favor of micro-housing.
âHe is the worst council member there is,â Valdez says. âHe is willfully defiant against rationality and logic when it comes to virtually everything. He is bad on development, bad on parking, bad on transportation. I am overjoyed that he will be departing.â
Rasmussen has a peculiar reputation. Heâs always sort of acted like he only represented West Seattleâremember when he tried to snag some money away from pedestrian projects in North Seattle for a project on Fauntleroy Way SW?âwhich made him well-suited for the new district model, sources at City Hall tell me. But heâs been known to introduce last-minute amendments to bills that can significantly change them, and despite being in his sixth year as chair of the councilâs transportation committee, some people say he hasnât actually done that much good work on transportation.
âAs chair of the transportation committee, he hasnât done anything remotely interesting,â says local transit advocate Ben Schiendelman. âAlmost all the interesting positive action on transportation has not come from the person whoâs supposed to be doing it.â
Rasmussen and other council members supported the car-only underground tunnel project downtown (a point I moronically forgot to mention in my earlier post; 500 lashes, please).
Around the start of that project, Rasmussen also voted against an effort to lock away $290 million in state money to cover the cost of tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and rebuilding the Alaskan Way surface street. That plan, pushed by Council Member Nick Licata, was meant to ensure the state didnât spend the money it had budgeted for the viaduct on overruns in the cost of the tunnel itself instead.
âHe knew all the risks and all the ways [the tunnel] could go wrong for Seattle, and he didnât do much,â says Cary Moon, founder of the People's Waterfront Coalition.
Now, as the project continues to face challenges, Rasmussen
maintains thereâs no need to consider a Plan B.
The tunnel was one of the central issues in a very unfriendly relationship between anti-tunnel former Mayor Mike McGinn and council members, including Rasmussen.
âI donât think he is representing the city very well because of his obsessive obsession with this project," Rasmussen said about McGinn in 2010. "This is going to have a ripple effect in terms of the cityâs ability to get things done in Olympia. He is unable to recognize that.â (Rasmussen made this statement after he didnât participate in a public forum on the project because heâd only read one page of a supplemental environmental impact statement that outlined the projectâs risks.)
That year, Rasmussen also spearheaded legislation to block McGinn from funding his Transit Master Plan, which would have studied, among other things, light rail service to West Seattle and Ballard. Then, he pushed back against a study of a streetcar in Eastlake because he didnât think it was an urgent need.
In 2013, he (and lefty favorite Nick Licata, whoâs also retiring from the council) helped block a study about how to get light rail across the ship canal toward Fremont. For transit advocates, the study was important in order to help inform what should be included in two upcoming transportation ballot measures: Bridging the Gap and Sound Transit 3.
So, does that mean Rasmussen just hates transit?
âHeâs very much a bus guy,â says Rob Johnson, the executive director of Transportation Choices who himself is running for city council this year. (Indeed, Rasmussen campaigned for the transit funding measure Proposition 1 in November.) Johnson compares Rasmussen to Licata, saying both have been skeptical of street cars and light rail. âI wouldnât call them opponents of those but it has translated into both of them being stronger bus advocates.â
On bikes, Rasmussenâs record is mixed. The Stranger has written before about the need to fund the cityâs Bicycle Master Plan (the cityâs prioritized wish list of bike projects thatâs estimated to cost about $20 million a year over 20 years) and the councilâs unwillingness to commit actual cash.
âIf he hadnât been so focused on preventing McGinn from getting political wins, a lot of the bike infrastructure weâre seeing happen now probably would have happened four or five years ago,â Schiendelman says, adding that improvements sooner could have saved the life of Sher Kung, a cyclist killed on Second Avenue in August just before improvements were made to the street where she died.
But Tom Fucoloro, who runs Seattle Bike Blog, and Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Cascade Bicycle Club, are more generous. They both praised Rasmussen's attention to getting the bike plan passed and say his final year on the council will be the time his legacy on the issue is fully formed. If he can find a way to fund the bike planâperhaps through the Bridging the Gap levy, which he says heâll focus on this yearââthat would be really enormous,â Kiker says.
âI think he does really care about biking issues,â Fucoloro says. âHe funds a lot of planning and wants to hold a lot of meetings, but Iâm not sure thatâs necessarily proving to be a bad strategy now. Suddenly, a lot of [bike improvements] are happening pretty quickly and a lot of that is because Tom has been working behind the scenes.â