In an unscripted speech to a packed room full of UW architecture students and faculty and staff last night, Mayor Mike McGinn reminisced about his campaign, laid out the case for light rail on 520, and made it clear that he hasn’t budged in his opposition to the $4.2 billion downtown tunnel.
McGinn’s fired-up talk, which reminded me of his campaign stump speech, was a notable departure from his staid, overlong inauguration remarks.
McGinn’s most compelling point was one I hadn’t heard him make in quite this way before: He argued that leaders who say it’s too late to revisit the idea of light rail on 520 had no problem revisiting the downtown tunnel after voters rejected both a tunnel and a new elevated viaduct.
“People voted down a tunnel, people voted down a new elevated and then the legislature and the governor came back with something people never even voted on,” McGinn said. “So when people say it’s too late to (consider) something else for 520, (I respond,) it wasn’t too late to build a deep-bore tunnel when that’s what the powerful interests wanted.
“We have no shortage of money. We have a shortage of political will.”
McGinn also touched a recent poll of voters on both sides of Lake Washington, which found that “sixty-nine percent of the people on this side of the lake think light rail on 520 is a good idea, and 70 percent of the people on that side of the lake think light rail on 520 is a good idea. So we have this idea that it’s east vs. west, but it isn’t—it’s legislators vs. the people.”
And he took questions for about an hour, on subjects ranging from his support base during the campaign (“we went to the service workers unions thinking we’d never get their support because all of the big construction unions wanted that tunnel, but they ended up backing me”) to his decision to spend so much political capital so early in his term (“I admit I’m a little bit hesitant to get into another big fight with everyone.”)
