Echoing the same points he’s been making for the past several months, Mayor Mike McGinn said this morning that a city council resolution that will delay three agreements between the city and the state until after contractors on the deep-bore tunnel release their bids will not protect the city from cost overruns on the project. And he said he would continue to support a referendum on the contracts once they’re signed, sometime in January or February of next year.
“I will not support approving [the agreements] until the state takes the responsibility for cost overruns,” McGinn said. The mayor, along with council member Mike O’Brien, wants to add language to the city-state agreements stipulating that tunnel construction won’t move forward unless the state legislature removes a provision in state law stating the legislature’s intent to make “Seattle-area property owners” pay for cost overruns on the tunnel.
“We’re just going to keep asking the question, ‘Who will pay?’ … I hope that in the next week as the council deliberates, they will consider asking the legislature to change that provision.”
Reiterating his support for a public vote on the tunnel contract (“If the public wants to weigh in on this, they’re entitled to do so”), McGinn accused the council of trying to keep the tunnel issue off the ballot. “They’ve been [saying] for months that we can’t take any delay. … What changed from three or four weeks ago, when the council said they were prepared to sign the agreements, [is] that the public spoke up and said if you proceed in that way, we want to have a public vote on the issue of the contracts,” McGinn said. “They don’t want a public vote. … I think there’s a fair question about whether the council would ever let the public vote on it.”
Yesterday, state Attorney General Rob McKenna sent a letter to Gov. Chris Gregoire saying the cost-overrun provision isn’t enforceable as written, and would require additional action by the state legislature to make it “operative.”
That, to McGinn, is even more reason to oppose signing the contracts without removing the cost-overrun language from state law. “If you’re a taxpayer nothing, in Attorney General McKenna’s letter should give you any comfort,” McGinn said. “What he’s saying is that the legislature indeed has the ability to make Seattle taxpayers pay” for overruns, by adopted additional legislation in the future.
But, I asked McGinn, doesn’t the legislature have that ability even if they remove the cost overrun language next session? If they reversed their legislative intent once, couldn’t they do it again in the future?
“I just think that the state actually saying they’ll take responsibility for cost overruns is better than them saying Seattle will pay,” McGinn said. “If we could get that statement of legislative intent that they intend to pay cost overruns, and get that memorialized in an agreement between the city and the state, I think we would be protected.”
State transportation leaders have said they have no intention of revisiting the cost-overruns provision in the upcoming session, which will be dominated by the budget. However, McGinn said that if the city presented a united front to the legislature, legislators might change their minds. (The cost-overruns measure passed by a narrow margin, 49-47, with six Seattle legislators voting for it.) “I can’t say to you that I have [legislators] who’ve said that they voted one way and now would vote the other way,” McGinn said, but “if the council wants to proceed with the contracts without addressing that, the legislature will have no incentive to remove the language.
“If we stand together, at least we’re in the game.”
