I know everyone is still chittering about the snow, but can we talk floods for a minute? Because last night county officials voted to allocate a total of $30 million to help replace Seattle’s seawall with money from the county’s Flood Control District fund.
This is big news considering the project wasn’t even on the county’s radar a month ago. The amendment to fund the seawall was recently introduced by King County Council members Larry Gossett and Bob Ferguson after Seattle officials argued that the county was overlooking huge flood prevention projects—like the seawall—while paying for non-flood related improvement projects, like Redmond’s fire station (more on that here). Seattle residents fund roughly one-third of the flood district’s $37.25 million budget through property taxes but only gets backs 16 cents on the dollar in improvements, argued Mayor Mike McGinn’s office.
So last night, as part of final budget negotiations, the Flood Control District Board approved Seattle’s request for $30 million to fund the seawall replacement, including reserving $4.25 million in the 2011 budget for the project. The full cost of replacing the seawall is estimated to cost the city $300 million.
“The King County Flood Control District was created to protect the region’s infrastructure from the economic and safety impacts of breached levees, so helping financially in the repair of the seawall is not only an appropriate use of those funds, but the highest and best calling for their use,” said Phillips in a press release.
“The failure of the seawall would cost more than 1,700 jobs, nearly $80 million in local wages and $32 billion in lost economic activity, disrupt major containing shipping business, delay freight and passenger rail traffic, disrupt sewer and electrical service and cause traffic and mobility impacts throughout the region,” added Gossett.
Yay!
300 million? Might be cost overruns and some safety issues (that I’ll invent later on). It doesn’t help service the mutant population who live in the underground Seattle area. No bike lanes, no light rail. I demand a public vote!! King County is clearly ignoring the will of the people who prefer to dilly, dally & delay all road projects!
@2: How dare McGinn get money for an essential safety project he’s been trying to push forward against the protestations of the City Council who are holding it hostage if he doesn’t give them their tunnel, how dare he!
It’s unsurprising to me that a Tunnel Everywhere Already cultist would lose his shit over the seawall getting money.
For some reason, $300 Million seems like such a small manageable amount. I think the tunnel fiasco has fucked up my brain’s sense of financial relativity.
I for one am happy Dow followed thru on this.
Way to go!
@3 you mean tearing down the Viaduct? Um, we’re still at stage 2 DEIS – there are three more stages before we even get to that.
Go read the WSDOT site.