I talked to mayoral candidate Mike McGinn downtown shortly after he announced that he wouldn’t try to stop a tunnel—a radical departure from his campaign platform and McGinn’s reality as we know it. “I’m gonna keep raising the issue of how are we gonna pay for cost overruns and how are we gonna pay for this in a way that fits our budget,” he said. “If we don’t have a good answer to those, we may find that the council and the legislature are gonna have to revisit that decision.”
So McGinn won’t be laying down in front of the tunnel-boring machine when construction starts. But he will push the legislature to undo the vague language that forces “property owners in the Seattle area who benefit from replacement of the existing viaduct with the deep bore tunnel” to pay cost overruns, he says. “While the council is committed to a course of action, a framework for moving forward, we don’t have even a cost estimate yet … and there’s still subsequent actions to be taken to actually raise the taxes and deal with the cost overruns. So there’s a lot of unanswered questions yet on this one,” McGinn says.
The tunnel plan the state legislature passed last year funds $2.4 billion of the tunnel cost. Another $400 million could come from tolls, but McGinn has said the tolling required to reach that number would require $6 one-way tolls, which very few people would pay. “Their tolling plan right now is gonna cause the surface streets to be flooded with cars, except we won’t have invested in transit, and we won’t have invested in I-5,” he says.
This isn’t the first time a Seattle politician has opposed an expensive project. “You know, Mayor Greg Nickels didn’t agree with the parks levy, but he’s building parks,” McGinn says. “I don’t agree with the tunnel decision, there’s still a lot of unanswered questions before we actually fully proceed with the project, but if there’s a 9-0 vote from the council, as mayor I would be bound by that policy decision of the council.” Of course—not to suggest causation or anything—Nickels did lose his next election after opposing the the parks levy.
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what a fucking tool.
@1-agreed, he has now embodied the worst of both parties: the R’s for the fearmongering with the gun ban crap he pulled on Mallahan and now the D’s by flip flopping like the best of them.
And this, girls and boys, is why you wait until the last minute to vote.
Kerry is a flip flopper!!!! Vote BUSH for decisive unwavering stupidity!!!!
First Mallahan wants to goto college, then he wants to run a bratwurst festival, then he wants to be a T-Mobile executive, now he wants to run for mayor?!? That’s not leadership!!! Pick one!!!
Ahhhh so many good comments so early!
@1, @2, and especially @3 FTW!!!!!
I’m seriously laughing my ass off at you moron fuckers for every considering McGinn to be anywhere near the quality of candidate as Mallahan!
Suckers!
ROFLMFAO
Edit: Every should be ever
I too want an edit feature for this jalopy of a forum! 🙂
This is unreal. What a fucking lame ass attempt by McGinn to save his shitty campaign.
I hope all you McGinn kool-aid drinkers read this and realize he’s abandoned you BEFORE THE ELECTION!
Oh no, now how will McGinn’s pro-density, pro-transit, pro-bike, pro-housing, pro-social justice, pro-small business, pro-environment campaign ever match Mallahan’s pro-writing-a-$400,000-check-to-buy-idiots’-votes campaign?
None of this makes Mallahan anything but a half-assed corporate shill who’s never lifted a finger for our community but wants to run it. Good on McGinn for accepting the facts and being honest about what he can and cannot do.
You haters realize the unanimous city council vote changes everything, right? It’s out of the mayor’s hands and McGinn is admitting that.
@10 if you mean by haters …. all the McGinn Kool Aid drinkers? All the Mallahan supporters support the tunnel idea.
The hipster McGinn Kool Aid drinkers think they have the power to stop the tunnel still even after this vote. They still don’t “get it”. that they have very little actual power at all in this city. They like to think they do, and they have lots of big scary sounding words they can type on SLOG posts, but at the end of the day, they are all just lemmings.
They actually believe in their little insulated worlds that McGinn still has a snowball’s chance in hell at getting more than 40% of the vote, let along enough to make it a close race!
Even after all of this …. they still find ways to excuse McGinn’s behavior, and justify his “new” platform! They still won’t admit that they have been completely betrayed and mislead that their hero is a zero!
So you really don’t expect them to accept any facts do you?
Really?
awww.
poor Mallahan staffers. so much ire and so little to make us want to vote for your candidate.
@12 Sorry Will
Your boy McGinn really fucked the goat on this one. No amount of spin will change that opinion!
And you damn well know that I am no staffer…
This announcement comes too late to even try and get my vote since I already mailed my ballot this weekend.
I’m not really fond of either candidate, but McGinn’s tunnel tantrums turned me off the most. His stance was starting to remind me of the whole monorail fiasco. The viaduct desperately needs to be replaced with something (anything!) and it needs to happen soon.
great, i’m voting for mcginn now. his stupid opposition to the tunnel was really my only hangup. how he ever expected to stop something already formally agreed to by the city, county, port and state is beyond me. in fact, he seems like a smart guy and i’m sure he’s realized this all along but kept up his opposition because it was becoming a cornerstone of his support. i was beginning to think his stubborn opposition was indicative of a bad kind of leadership style, which is why i was leaning toward mallahan, albeit tepidly. he may still be stubborn, but at least he’s removed a major point of hesitation in my book. i’m glad we can put this behind us and move on.
@15 nice cover closet McGinn staffer
That is exactly the line of logic you are hoping that voters will now take, given that your man McGinn has “changed his position” …err I mean flip flopped… err I mean deferred to the City Council
But hey you needed to light some kind of fire under voters now that your support is waning….
Right?
😉
Nice try
LOL.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a city has multiple issues to deal with.
Kind of like the policy platforms that McGinn put out – on a whole host of subjects – which in some cases were then literally repeated a day or two later by the overpaid campaign consultants (yeah, I know you all post on SLOG, but deal with it) as Mallahan’s positions.
But this is the best you can do – pointing out that McGinn isn’t a doctrinaire unyielding person, that he actually deals with the real things that are happening at the time, that he migh be quite capable of working with diverse groups of people with differing opinions on what our city, our region, are doing.
Hmm, sounds good to me. I’m glad I voted for McGinn last week.
McGinn is not capable of working with diverse groups of people; he is not capable of working with people, period. As Will in Seattle, if you think I am a paid political consultant, bwa ha ha ha. I am a citizen who has watched McGinn fall on his face more than once in committee meetings, totally incapable of leadership. Apparently you have not watched him at work. It scares me what’s in store for this city if he becomes mayor.
I already voted McGinn, but I was a little conflicted because I thought he was going to do something stupid to lose tunnel funding (I’m conflicted about the tunnel as well, though, so…yeah…I’m conflicted). So I’m glad he’s taking this approach to it.
I won’t be crying my eyes out if Mallahan wins though. Their both unknown quantities.
Good politicians and good people can and should change their positions, given new circumstances. I don’t think that McGinn has really changed his position now though. He is still very critical of the proposal, and will be a watchdog (instead of a car-centric cheerleader in Mallahan) of the project.
@ 16, Actually my husband made the same exact comment this morning.
Please… this doesn’t change anything. McGinn should have released the statement two weeks ago. There’s no flip flop. Even the statement makes it clear he still thinks it’s the wrong decision. He’s simply listening to what many of his pro-transit friends have been saying for awhile now. The tunnel is going to collapse on its own.
Hopefully, this forces the media to stop classifying him as a “single issue candidate” and actually start to pay attention to the SEVERAL policy papers, plans, and speeches he’s given on a variety of issues. Or, they could just treat him like Prince — “the mayoral candidate formerly opposed to the tunnel.”
I’m convulsive with laughter at the pitiful fools who believed McGinn was an idealistic crusader for truth, justice, and the American way! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just Mike McGinn twisting himself into a tortuous posture as he capitulates on another stance. The man was a CORPORATE LAWYER! Wake up! Now we have two nonentities running for mayor!