Officials ducking their duty on viaduct

Maybe the 13th time will be the charm.

Once again we the people get to decide a major transportation issue — the fate of Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct. It was thrown into our laps last week by the governor and the mayor and the other decision-avoiders we've hired to shirk their duties around here. This vote will be our 13th in a decade on transportation. We have voted twice on light rail, five times on monorail, twice on gas taxes for road building and three times on Tim Eyman transportation measures.

How are you feeling about all that voting? Gotten much out of it?

Yes, we are a populist state. Voters here like to have a say. But all this saying is getting in the way of any doing.

Gov. Chris Gregoire was correct when she said we're having a tough time agreeing on what to do with our shaky waterfront highway. But then she and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels copped out.

"The only way to break the logjam is to have a vote of the people," she said. "It's the only viable alternative to doing nothing."

If that's true, then what are the politicians for? Isn't this the very job we hired them to do — to break political logjams? To give here and get there, to bend some arms and scratch some backs and somehow come up with something? Anything?

Instead, they want us to do it. So they don't have to.

We barely have a representative democracy anymore. The representative part has checked out. The democracy part may look like it's in full swing — there's certainly a lot of voting going on — but it isn't leading anywhere.

Gregoire is hoping a viaduct vote will end the matter. I hope so, too, but it's easy to see how having this vote, the way they've structured it, may only prolong our agony.

What if the idea of a tunnel wins, but then we can't come up with the money to pay for it?

The mayor wants some money to come from a three-county regional tax, to be voted on a year from now. (Yes, that's right — transportation vote No. 14!) We could have Seattle saying yes to a tunnel and the region saying no to paying for it. More delay, more money wasted.

Or what if the vote is close, as it was with Safeco Field? Think it'll stick?

Maybe if Seattle voters back a new elevated viaduct, then that will settle it. Maybe. Seattleites voted for the monorail four times, yet those votes settled nothing. Much of the city's power elite continued to fight it. Somehow, I doubt downtown businesses or the city's green movement are going to embrace a bigger, uglier viaduct just because it wins a single advisory vote.

Which is what this will be. Without specific taxes on the ballot, this is a glorified poll. It's a shrug and a finger in the wind from our elected leaders: "We can't figure this out. Can you?"

I wrote a column last March praising Gregoire for her talent as a fixer. She had dragged warring factions together — the doctors and the lawyers, the farmers and the environmentalists. She practically forced them to make deals, at one point demanding it with the jab of a finger to a lawmaker's chest.

Where is that spirit now?

I'm not asking any more of her or the mayor than our system demands of its most run-of-the-mill citizens.

I remember the last time I was on a court jury. There was not a professional problem-solver in the group. We had to decide if a guy had stabbed another guy in the stomach.

Some witnesses had been so unreliable that we argued for days and couldn't reach a verdict. We told the judge we couldn't do it. It's a logjam, we said.

"No, that's not acceptable," said the judge. "Try harder."

In the end, we haggled four times longer than it had taken to try the case. We unanimously voted to let the guy go free, even though we knew he was probably guilty.

It was messy. Some on the jury had backed down from strongly held convictions. Nobody felt proud. But we had done the one thing society was depending on us to do. Which was make a decision.

Governor, mayor, lawmakers: Try harder.

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