Today’s paper reported that the Sound Transit bored tunnel through Beacon Hill created a 21-foot hole underneath a house, one of several “voids” in Beacon Hill that has resulted from the tunneling. How do the soils of Beacon Hill compare with those beneath downtown Seattle where a tunnel would go? According to the State Department of Transportation, the glacial sand, silt, clay and other soils are similar to the hard and dense soils along most of the proposed SR 99 bored tunnel alignment. Except these soils are beneath office and residential towers, not single family homes.

So how can Mayor Nickels and the other patrons of the Viaduct Tunnel claim with a straight face that there will be no cost overruns? Professor Flyvbjerg of Oxford University composed a study of 258 mega-transportation projects around the world and concluded 9 out of 10 have cost overruns, by an average of 30%. And as Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat notes:

Many aspects of the new tunnel seem to jibe, generically, with Flyvbjerg’s recipe for a boondoggle. It has been minimally engineered. It has boosters spinning for it, in this case a Seattle think tank, the Discovery Institute. And there is extreme political pressure — or exhaustion — after eight years of dithering and delay.

The Legislature must think there will be cost overruns—that’s why they just passed a law to make

A tunnel boring machine

Seattle property owners liable for cost overruns. How did Mayor Nickels react? By casually dismissing the to potential harm to Seattle:

“That language is the state’s problem,” Nickels said. “Not mine.” […] “It’s an unenforceable bit of language,” Nickels said. “There is no mechanism for them to enforce that. They cannot create a Local Improvement District legislatively. It’s a meaningless piece of legislation.”

The Mayor’s statement exhibits a shocking ignorance of Olympia’s position on the issue—-or a willful desire to push forward with the project regardless of the ultimate costs to Seattle taxpayers and Seattle priorities. The issue created by the tunnel law is not whether it properly created a “local improvement” taxing district, as Mayor Nickels would have it. The point is that the state has clearly indicated that it will not pay for cost overruns, and the Legislature controls the purse strings. As much as Mayor Nickels might want to, he cannot tell the Legislature, “Your law is unenforceable. Now that I have explained that to you, can you round up a couple of more billion dollars for Seattle?” Seattle should take Olympia at its word: if there are cost overruns, Seattle taxpayers will pay for them. This at a time when we desperately need to preserve existing bus service, and fullfill the promise to build new RapidRide bus lines.

The tunnel is a boondoggle and the wrong priority for Seattle.