Just as City Council President Richard Conlin says that the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) won't botch the deep-bore tunnel under downtown—and since they can't botch it, Seattle doesn't need to worry about what could possibly go wrong—we learn that, uh, sometimes the state does botch a project, and then won't talk about it:

The chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee wants a “thorough investigation” into how a nearly $1 million design mistake on the state’s Nalley Valley viaduct project occurred and why her committee was not informed of it. [...]

“WSDOT staff was asked directly (by committee staff) if there were any problems with the project and said there were none,” Haugen wrote in her e-mail. She called withholding the error a “serious breakdown” by the department.

“At best, it indicates that the culture of learning from mistakes at WSDOT is broken,” she wrote. “At worst, it raises the question of whether WSDOT’s culture allows for the hiding of mistakes and this only came to light because of its visible nature.”