Is viaduct monorail déjà vu?

Last week, as Seattle's City Council was crafting ballot measures that might decide the fate of our waterfront freeway, one councilman said: "Kind of reminds you of the monorail, doesn't it?"

He was talking about that empty feeling where you vote for something repeatedly yet never get it. But to me, it sums up the maddeningly quixotic way we go about building big stuff around here.

It starts with a dream. It's a grand dream, so people find it alluring. Although a few scoffers get all reality-based about the cost. So officials who ought to be more dispassionate start hustling it like carnival barkers.

Later, something goes wrong. Price goes up or money goes down. That's to be expected, but the barkers are in it deep. They go on barking.

Until a full-blown political crisis hits.

They respond in two ways. They accuse others of sabotaging them. And they unveil a new plan, one that's cheaper yet somehow as good as the old plan, which they now disparage as foolishly inflated.

So it has gone with the idea of putting Highway 99 into a tunnel, I say to Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, right-hand man of Mayor Greg Nickels. It's monorailian déjà vu.

We're sitting in Ceis' office in City Hall. I have known him for 20 years. He's got a thick skin, but the comparison to the monorail disaster kind of hurts.

"The people involved this time are not a bunch of well-meaning amateurs," he counters. "We've done six years of work by engineers. This is not an 'X' drawn on a napkin by a cab driver."

Still, he allows the city made a mistake in mulishly sticking with its bigger tunnel plan for too long. He now calls that tunnel a "monstrosity." (Again, I remind readers this was the same tunnel the mayor's office was hailing until a week ago.)

Ceis says the city was trying for months to get the cost down. But the public wasn't clued in that a smaller tunnel was in the works (though the mayor did suggest just that on KUOW-FM radio in October).

So, the new tunnel wrongly suffers from "rabbit-out-of-the-hat syndrome," he said.

"We know what the perception is. The only way to combat that now is to have independent experts review the plan and see that it's defensible."

I'm all for that. Except the governor says it might be too late.

"It's not too late," Ceis insists. "There's time to hear this out before the [March 13] vote. But beyond that, how could it be too late to come up with a better way that's more than a billion dollars cheaper?"

OK. We're voting on it anyway. Might as well be open to what they have to say.

I'm no engineer. I can't say if the plan is legit. So far, though, much of it sounds like spin.

Like how they're calling it a "hybrid tunnel" (so eco!). Or how they've left the price tags off the ballot because they say there's no room (isn't it only a couple of numbers?).

I got burned on the monorail. As Ceis quipped, I have a monorail hangover.

Yes, and this monorailian sales job on the tunnel is making me queasy all over again.

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

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