The joke, alas, is on South Park

Sometimes life overtakes satire. Especially when local government is involved.

I say this because last week I was down in South Park — the little neighborhood nobody wants — and someone mentioned there's talk of running a foot ferry across the Duwamish River.

It's an emergency idea, I was told. A boat could take people across the 100-yard-wide river once the decrepit bridge, which carries 20,000 cars and trucks daily, closes at the end of June.

And I realized: I can't tell the difference between real life and a fake joke anymore.

Because back in November 2007, I wrote a column questioning why King County was paying tens of millions for an indulgence, a Mosquito Fleet of foot ferries. While at the same time it had no plan to replace a basic necessity, the South Park Bridge that is a backbone of local industry and commerce.

At the time I didn't believe the leadership around here would ever be so dysfunctional as to abandon that bridge. To just walk away. So I ended that 2007 column with what I thought was mockery.

"Oh well," I wrote. "When the bridge falls, I guess we can run a foot ferry across the Duwamish."

Hey, King County and Seattle government officials: That was not a policy proposal! It was a joke. The point being that bridges are vital, while a foot ferry, across a river, would be ludicrous.

Wouldn't it?

So much for satire. At 7 p.m. on June 30th, after failing for 30 years to come up with money to replace the bridge, King County plans to close it. Permanently, say the signs.

Now some groups looking at how to keep South Park from suffocating without its main drag have suggested crossing the Duwamish the old-fashioned way.

"People there are looking at barges, at foot ferries, at boats on a cable system of some sort," says Dave Gering, director of the Duwamish Transportation Management Association, an industry group. "It's not that people think these are great ideas. It's desperation. That's what we've been left with — Third World solutions."

When I ask Jaspal Chandi about the ferry idea, he laughs. But it's one of those laughs that goes on too long, so you can tell he thinks it's more painful than funny.

Chandi is the clerk at the South Park 76, a gas station and sub shop. Its lifeblood is traffic from the bridge. When it closes and everyone has to "go around" — to the First Avenue South Bridge — he thinks the little downtown in South Park will go with it.

"This will be a ghost town," he says. "Permanently means forever. I think they are going to close the bridge forever and that will be that."

Standing nearby is Rob Mladineo, of PNK Builder Services, who is there to fix some leaky pipes. He laughs at the ferry idea, too, wondering whether we could make it one of those rope-drawn contraptions they used a hundred years ago to cross the Mississippi River.

What's being done to South Park, though, isn't amusing.

"The bottom line here is: This place is filled with poor and/or brown people," says Mladineo, who lives in the suburbs and is white. "So it's not on the map. If that bridge were in Newcastle you know the government would fix it. You just know it.

"I don't think you could find a clearer case of discrimination by local government in the last 40 years than what they're doing to South Park."

He means the institutional sort of bias, in which neighborhoods with power people like Paul Allen get pointless new street cars while South Park can't hold on to a useful bridge. Regardless of the cause, the neglect is a scandal.

We're left with the spectacle of one of the richer cities in the richest country in the world leaving some of its own residents to talk of fording an in-city river in boats.

OK, that's an exaggeration. What they're really being told is: "Drive around."

Makes you wonder: Couldn't that advice be good enough for Medina or Montlake? Do we really need a new bridge across Lake Washington when everyone could just drive around?

Sorry, I should know better than to end with any jokes. They might get taken seriously.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.