Do you have questions for Seattle City Councilmembers? How does the Council want to handle the City’s 2011 $50 million budget deficit?  What are their thoughts on a solution for rebuilding the State Route 520 bridge? How do they feel the search for a new Seattle Police Chief search is going?  This episode of City Inside/Out: Council Edition features Seattle City Council Finance and Budget Chair Jean Godden, Public Safety Chair Tim Burgess and Energy and Technology Chair Bruce Harrell answering your questions.

Whatever your question is, if you want it answered on TV, you have to call 206-684-8821 or email contact@seattlechannel.org. Host C.R. Douglas will also raise the key issues facing Seattle. You can also submit your questions or watch past episodes by visiting the City Inside/Out: Council Edition website, http://www.seattlechannel.org/CouncilEdition/.

Don’t miss this opportunity to put your issues before the City’s lawmakers! Call or email right now! Then tune in Wednesday, February 24 at 7 p.m. on SEATTLE CHANNEL, Cable 21, to get answers.

Elsewhere in the program, Douglas asked Councilmembers if they had any regrets about 2009. Councilmember Tim Burgess replied, “I was really disappointed that we did not do a better job of explaining why the bag fee was a very important step forward in our environmental protection work that Seattle has, in many ways, led the nation on. I also regret probably speaking out too soon before I was ready about downtown street crime problems and panhandling and not then being able to adequately back up what I was advocating for. But after the first of the year, we’ll re-launch that effort.”

State government says it’s necessary to spend up to $4.6 billion to replace the bridge and its corridor between Seattle and Bellevue. The bridge opened in 1963 and the state has determined the structure is nearing the end of its life. Recently, a key group of legislators, including state House Transportation Chair Judy Clibborn, endorsed the so-called “A+” plan to replace the bridge and reconfigure traffic in the Montlake neighborhood. The plan includes building a second drawbridge over the Montlake Cut in addition to a new six-lane span over Lake Washington. The plan would also continue to provide access to and from the bridge via Lake Washington Boulevard that transverses the Washington Park Arboretum.

Rep. Clibborn says, The “‘A+’ [plan] is what we can pay for.” She also adds that she is confident that a new drawbridge will be able to be permitted in an extremely environmentally sensitive area—the Montlake Cut that provides the only passage for fish that migrate from Puget Sound to Lake Washington.

“A+ is dead on arrival,” responds the Coalition for a Sustainable 520’s Jonathan Dubman. “The A+ plan…runs the table on doing everything wrong from one end of this corridor to the other…It doesn’t fix the problems and it causes new ones.” Dubman would prefer a tunnel that goes under the Montlake Cut and allows bridge traffic to and from the north to bypass the Montlake neighborhood entirely.

The Arboretum Foundation’s Paige Miller says, “The plans simply favor concrete over parks, none of them address our concerns.”  Miller stresses that a new 520 bridge should no longer use Lake Washington Boulevard as “a long on-and-off ramp for 520.” Instead she wants to see strong traffic calming measures–perhaps even tolling the Boulevard–to discourage vehicles from going through the Arboretum.

Earlier he explained to host C.R. Douglas, “The Legislature was intent on jamming a new elevated highway down our throats. I could not look my children or my grandchildren in the eye if we allowed another elevated highway to mar that wonderful physical asset that we have in Puget Sound. So I stuck to my guns.”

See if you can match the statement to the pundit:

1. “I think [the McGinn] administration is going to be the most unpredictable change in Seattle politics since Wes Uhlman was elected way back forty years ago—a whole new generation, a whole new outlook, a whole new crowd.”

2. “The tunnel wasn’t as big an issue to ordinary voters in the general election as media types thought it was.”

3. “This [McGinn] vote was anti-establishment.”

4. Initiative-writer Tim Eyman “is the zombie of Washington state politics. His obituary is written after every initiative [that] loses and he comes back with something else.”

Answers: 1. Conservative John Carlson 2. Anti-tunnel pundit Erica. C. Barnett     

3. Centrist Joni Balter  4. Mossback Knute Berger.  

Doud versus Holland

Doud and Holland disagree over the Port’s proposed $300 million contribution to replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel under downtown Seattle. “I like the tunnel,” says Holland. “I think that there are investments that should be made that continue to help move freight through the region.” Doud, by contrast, thinks that the tunnel decision is worth another look. “We need to evaluate other options,” he says. Moreover, he opposes the Port spending $300 million on the tunnel.  “I am not for the Port contributing to a state highway,” he says.

 Albro versus Vekich

City Inside/Out host C.R. Douglas asks Albro and Vekich about the backers of their campaigns. Albro’s critics, Douglas says, point out many of the candidate’s contributions come from big businesses that depend on Port contracts. Albro says, “I have many, many people who are supporting me from all walks of life—good government people, small business, friends—I am independent, absolutely, positively.” Douglas asks Vekich about the financial and volunteer support that he is receiving from labor unions. Vekich replies, “If you look at my record in the [state] Legislature, I’m nobody’s man—I’m my own man…I’ve even voted against my own union at times.”

A viewer named Randy asked, “You worked hard to push for the bore tunnel replacement for the viaduct. How secure do you think that decision is? Could it be undone at this point?”

Nickels replied, “A funny thing in politics is, it’s always easier to stop something than it is to get it done.”

The mayor said that the tunnel plan had broad support from the state’s political class. “We have the agreement of the governor, the legislature, the county and the city that this is the right approach.” He also thought that even among members of the public who would have preferred another option—a new elevated structure, the rehabilitation of the current viaduct or the surface transit plan—there is acceptance that the tunnel has triumphed. They “now say, ‘Okay, a decision has been made. Let’s not refight or redo this. Let’s move forward and then let’s fix the next problem,’” observed the mayor. Because of the political support and the public acceptance, Nickels said, “I’m confident that [the tunnel] will happen.”

In the next breath, however, the mayor added, “But it’s not guaranteed. A person who wanted to kill it and was dedicated to just that probably could do it.”

Councilmember Nick Licata, co-chair of the Council’s Pedestrian Safety Committee, says, “We have over 400 pedestrian [-vehicle] crashes per year. It’s still too early to give a positive answer” on whether the City’s pedestrian safety effort is working. Licata went on to cite national studies that show that sidewalks reduce the number of pedestrian/vehicle crashes.

In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Research Program released a report that summarized research on pedestrian safety in the United States including the safety effects of various roadway features. According to the FHWA’s summary, “[S]ites with no sidewalks were the most hazardous to pedestrians, and sites where sidewalks were present on both sides of the road were least hazardous.”  Surprisingly, the FHWA found that painted crosswalks did not improve pedestrian safety. In fact, on multi-lane roads with a high volume of traffic, more pedestrian-vehicle crashes occur in painted crosswalks than unpainted ones. Researchers conjecture that pedestrians exercise less caution in painted crosswalks.

There are 952 miles (at 16 blocks to a mile, roughly 15,232 blocks) of city streets that do not have sidewalks, according to the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). Bridging the Gap, a voter-approved transportation levy, provides around $1 million per year for building new sidewalks. With this funding, in 2008, the City built 15 blocks of new sidewalk; in 2009 the City’s goal is to increase that amount to 25 blocks.

Councilmember Licata said, “We are making the improvements…The expectation is, ‘Yes, we will see these changes,’ but we are not going to see them in the next six months. It’s going to take a couple of years.”

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.”