News Jan 28, 2010 at 4:00 am

Voters Elected You to Protect Seattle from Cost Overruns on the Tunnel, and You’re Our Only Hope

Comments

1
Mr Holden: you state that McGinn should "organize Seattle's delegation in the legislature to introduce a bill that removes Seattle's obligation to pay for a state project". That clause is in there BECAUSE of Seattle's delegation. You can thank Seattle's Frank Chopp personally for that little bit of legislative NASTINESS. It was inserted at his insistence! And nobody wants to cross Frank Chopp!
2
It is there rightfully so, Seattle bicker for years, and then forced off the table the states options for the riskiest one, that is inherently going to have cost over runs with the hopes of sticking the state taxpayer with the cost overruns and not having to pay a penny of them! I am glad to see the state is rewriting the current clause so that it should be able to stand up in court. Maybe it will teach Seattle the the residents of the rest of the state are tired of their BS and tired of throwing their tax money out the window at Seattle's project penalizing bickering.
3
The fact is that a majority of Seattleites support the tunnel as an acceptable compromise, and the opposition is divided into two opposite camps. Those that want way more car capacity in a replacement, and those that want to kill the car (and occupants). There is a symmetry to the debate, and the tunnel is the only option that is aligned in the center.
4
The fact is that a vast majority of Seattle CITIZENS who VOTE don't want the Billionaires Tunnel and they won't vote for the REQUIRED vote of our citizens to build it.

Tunnels ain't free.

Look, just the potential cost overrun every property owner and citizen of Seattle is liable for is $1 BILLION dollars.

That's a LOT of money.

The tunnel is dead.
5
Mike McGinn has no shred of credibility on this issue or on the seawall or the tunnel at all. Everyone but his paid press person Domenic Holden know that.

His start is so bad... How bad is it... He is as believable talking about this issue as George Bush was talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002.
6
@5 - aww.

you must really hate losing all the time.

get used to it.
7
All your flowers are not belong to Pam Roach.
8
There's one comment in this article I find particularly intriguing, and it comes from council prez Richard Conlin:
He says that the point of no return would come when bids and estimates show the tunnel "can't make this budget."

"There is ambiguity," Conlin admits. "My feeling is that this is an ambiguity that we can live with until we have to deal with it."

This raises the question, is the plan to do some sort of fixed-bid contract on the tunnel? Or shouldn't that be the plan? That way the contractor would be on the hook for cost overruns, and we'd know beforehand precisely what the price tag will be, so we can pull out before it's too late.

Anyone have any insights into this?
9
Who wants to bet on a retrofit at this point?
10
"For example, costs for the Big Dig on the Boston waterfront swelled from a $2.6 billion estimate to the $14.6 billion final tab."

Can we please, please, please stop comparing the waterfront tunnel to the Big Dig? It's the laziest analogy in the history of infrastructure projects. They are both tunnels. Soils are different, they are different lengths, different sizes, managed by different people and organizations using different equipment, different materials, different contractors under different contracts and with different oversight. But other than that they're exactly the same.

Me and Ted Haggard are both human beings. ONE of us is a self-loathing, closeted homo preacher with a meth problem. Shockingly, when this became apparent, I wasn't suddenly at higher risk for meth addiction, nor did I suddenly become gay.

Seriously, apples and gal bladders.

Please wait...

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