On the August 2009 edition of City Inside/Out: Council Edition, host C.R. Douglas asks Seattle City Councilmembers, “Is the tunnel a done deal?”

Douglas was asking, of course, about the state plan to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a 1.7 mile, $1.9 billion deep-bore tunnel under Seattle’s downtown. This summer, the initial stage of the project began as the Washington State Department of Transportation began drilling test bores throughout downtown.

Even Councilmember Nick Licata, a longtime tunnel opponent, says, “I find it hard to imagine undoing it at this point.”

Tunnel supporter Councilmember Sally Clark went further. “It’s not just a deal. It’s not something that is just a handshake,” she says. “This is a project. It has been approved through the Legislature by the Governor…It is dangerous to the rest of Seattle’s legislative agenda to make this a high priority and take it to Olympia and say ‘We want to revisit it.’”

Councilmember Licata says, however, that he can imagine a scenario where the state backs away from the deep-bore tunnel. “There is only about three to five percent design done and there are some pretty large gaps in where the money is coming from. If those gaps grow and the design looks like it’s not working out, the [state] Legislature may decide [the tunnel] is too big of a fish to swallow.”