Thank you, West Seattle Herald and Nick Licata, for speaking out against the city council's plan to beautify the waterfront at the cost of the entire city's environment.

Look at the real cost of this plan, which replaces a 50 year old facility but makes no provision for the increased traffic the 500,000 people the mayor wishes to bring into the city will generate:

Tunnel Costs

Construction cost estimate - $5.5 billion

City Light costs - $.5 billion

Aurora reconstruction - $.4 billion

Total cost estimates - $6.4 billion

Average cost overrun of public projects (40 percent) - $2.6 billion

Financing costs - $9 billion

Total Cost - $18 billion

That is creating a debt equal to $30,000 for every person living in Seattle

The majority of Seattle's City Council do not want a tunnel or a viaduct along the waterfront - they want a park and now a beach. If they were honest with the people of Seattle they would come out and say so.

Council Members Drago, Conlin, Godden, Rasmussen and Steinbrueck, representing a majority of the council, believe it is more important to have a pretty beachfront park along the waterfront than to provide a modern transportation roadway through the city. They wish to minimize automobile use in the city even as the mayor pushes to add over 500,000 new residents to the city's current population.

They claim to be environmentalists, but their plan, which will force 150,000 daily auto trips through the city onto already crowded downtown streets and I-5 will create unimaginable gridlock, and air pollution over all of downtown Seattle throughout the day. This council believes that if they make traffic bad enough people will stop using their cars. Perhaps they should try driving through Paris or Rome where the grid lock they intend to force on Seattle already exists.

It is not a coincidence that the only time the city council ever included financing cost in a project was when they wished to defeat the Monorail. They said the people should vote on a modern 14 mile transit plan that would have linked all of western Seattle, and then they campaigned against it. Think about it; $11 billion was too much to pay for14 miles of modern transit, but $18 billion isn't too much to pay for 1.5 miles of tunnel.

We were smart enough to vote on the Monorail, but they say we are not smart enough to vote on their plan for the waterfront. We are not being allowed to vote because the council knows we would vote for the viaduct - an answer they do not want to hear.

This is an attempt by the council to manipulate the public into believing the park is the only reasonable solution to replacing the viaduct. The city council did not choose the tunnel option because they want a tunnel, but because it was the most costly option of the two choices given them by the governor. They know it can't be funded. They will then come up with the "beautiful park and beach transit solution" as the only available option.

When this scenario plays out we should immediately began organizing a recall election to bring back honest and open government to Seattle.

Frank Bradley

Gatewood