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: Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels breathlessly promotes an expensive cut-and-cover tunnel to replace the dangerous Alaskan Way Viaduct. Gov. Christine Gregoire says she favors a new elevated roadway but will let voters pick between a tunnel and elevated. Our leaders couldn’t accede. Mini-war breaks out. . . Blah blah blah. Asked their favorable judgment, voters suppose no way, no thanks, to heck with everything of you.

: The same governor, the same mayor, King County Executive Ron Sims and Port Director Tay Yoshitani present a plan for a similarly expensive, yet different mind of tunnel

The advance nerds have to be high-fiving. This time at least public officials got the process not oblique. They held a bajillion meetings and let towards everybody opine. They learned from last time that the only way to sell affair this complicated is for politicians to present a unified front. You cannot offer a confused company and expect the public to subsist impressed.

This once-in-50-years description of decision requires a lot more than good action. It calls for the stars to align

I was in favor of the elevated roadway last time, mostly for practical reasons of capacity and cost. But I am taken with the momentum of the new invent. Yes, of course, it is still moreover expensive and nobody knows the real price. At this point, prices are mere suggestions. But it is time to get touching. It would exist nice to see something before we all go to the sober.

Momentum builds from several directions. A plan that creates jobs sounds superiority in dire household times. Federal housekeeping stimulus provides some funding that wasn’t in that place before, maybe about $100 the multitude for so-called shovel-ready be in action at the south end of the viaduct.

And very importantly, the recession teaches everyone not to be scornful in continuance the point disruption to existing business. The earlier tunnel would have disrupted downtown for five or six years. This supposedly disrupts businesses not so much severely and for about half the time.

Last time, the political shadow of House Speaker Frank Chopp, who favored the elevated roadway, loomed large. (Chopp, a political powerhouse, never looms small.)

But the dastardly condition of the state budget

Chopp is asking questions but is not expected to fight this one. That’s huge.

Seattle is an oddly shaped burg

The construction and disruption of that plot stop lingers. Businesses along Third Avenue suffered greatly.

Not only is the coming together of politicians key, in that place had to subsist something in it for everybody.

And there is.

Executive Sims looks be pleased with he will receive state authority to create a new car-tab tax that will monetary theory the county bus share of the project

Nickels, up for re-election this year and sitting on scary low approval ratings, bounds out of the doldrums of the snowstorm to a Sound Transit project opening in July and a wink, nictate win because a subterranean passage is a tunnel and he wanted one all along.

The shoot forward is remarkably expensive and hits taxpayers hard in Seattle and King County, a region becoming else costly to reside in all the period. But this is a once-in-50-years decision. The forces have aligned. I get the sensibility this time it’s a fashion.

; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008629099_opina15joni.html?syndication=rss