City More Nickels Pro-Tunnel Campaign Propaganda
This morning, Mayor Greg Nickels announced the “city’s vision” for Seattle’s downtown waterfront. That “vision,” the product of months of taxpayer-funded work by the city’s Department of Planning and Development (which answers to the mayor), assumes—surprise!— a decision by the city (or voters) to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a cut-and-cover tunnel. In other words, Nickels’s propaganda piece assumes the existence of a waterfront tunnel as a way of selling it to voters, who have so far been skeptical, at best, about Nickels’s as-yet-unfunded $4-billion-plus tunnel. (Support for replacing the viaduct with another viaduct, meanwhile, remains high.)
But never mind reality; the mayor’s waterfront “vision” is pure politics. According to the web site unveiled by the mayor this morning, building the tunnel “is a once in a life time opportunity to reshape the city. The Waterfront Plan represents the City’s greatest aspiration to seize this extraordinary opportunity…. It is a project that will define the city for the next 100 years and one by which it will be measured in history.”
Good lord. Well, if I’d known that a waterfront Seattle citizens barely use would define the city for all of history, I would have supported the tunnel all along. The site continues floridly:
Removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct presents an unprecedented opportunity for creating a grand pedestrian promenade along the Waterfront and lively east-west connections for walking and bicycling to and from the Center City core. Walking is a healthy, sustainable, and enlivening urban experience and the Waterfront provides an exceptional opportunity for people to enjoy this activity.
Walking is healthy? Now that’s exactly the kind of information I rely on Mayor Nickels to tell me.
Elsewhere in the mayor’s presentation are photos showing what other cities have done after tearing down waterfront freeways. Among the cities featured are Melbourne, Sydney, Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, and NYC. What the presentation doesn’t mention is that in almost every case Nickels’s presentation cites, the cities tore down waterfront freeways and did not replace them—making the case against Nickels’s costly cut-and-cover tunnel and for the more sensible surface/transit option.
The mayor’s campaign for his controversial tunnel has become increasingly brazen over the last few months, as the line between Greg Nickels, Seattle mayor, and Greg Nickels, spokesperson for Citizens for a Better Waterfront, has blurred. Citizens, the Ethics and Elections-sanctioned front for Nickels’s tunnel campaign, has raised about $40,000 so far, much of it from the Downtown Seattle Association, the Holland America cruise line, and the Seattle Mariners.
So far, the pro-tunnel folks have spent the overwhelming majority of their money on three things: Polls, focus groups, and fundraising for more money. Nickels’s pollster, Don McDonough, wouldn’t say much what the focus groups and polls revealed, but given the difficulty Nickels has had separating his campaign activities from his official business, it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see some of those poll results morph into official Nickels sound bites in the near future.
So is Nickels basically asking us to finance a $10 billion walking track so he can lose a little weight?