Mayor Greg Nickels was in Ballard last week promoting a number of initiatives for the beginning of his second term in office. The viaduct replacement, in all its permutations, has dominated recent headlines but the mayor's biggest push last week was for projects significantly more pedestrian. One of the most important, he said, is finding funding for repairing roads and bridges.

"It's not very sexy but it's very important. At some point, you get a street in such disrepair, you've got to rebuild that street. We don't want to get to that point," Nickels said.

The mayor's office is putting together a plan for consideration on the ballot this fall, with either a bond or a levy measure. The aim is to cover the funding gap in city transportation budgets that was created by a series of court decisions, initiatives, and a decline in revenue from gas taxes.

The mayor also responded to criticisms about the parks department, which has come under fire recently from residents claiming that the department's public input process isn't inclusive enough, or, less charitably, that the process itself is a sham.

The mayor acknowledged the problem was worth looking into. He said he had asked the Board of Parks Commissioners - a volunteer citizen board that makes non-binding recommendations to the department - to examine the process the parks department uses. But he was also emphatic that some of the hue and cry about public process was simply people unhappy about the results of that process.

"We'll look at the process and make sure it's meaningful. But part of it being meaningful means that, at the end of the day, a decision gets made and we move forward."

Nickels said that a political culture had evolved in Seattle where a new round of public process was spawned with every negative response to a proposal. In effect, anyone unhappy with a project outcome deserved another public input process, so projects weren't being completed, just rehashed. He used the playfield at Loyal Heights as an example:

"That was in the Pro Parks Levy years ago. It was going to be a turf field with lights. And that promise was made to the voters. The people right around there don't like that but for the greater good of the city, we're building this network of parks where you can play into the evening, on a surface that you can actually use in our climate. So we're going to move forward on that."

Nickels said another priority this year was providing support to a school district that had lost the confidence of the people of Seattle. Nickels said he wanted to be both a civic cheerleader for the school district and, when required, take the district to task for poor decisions. He said an example of such a decision was the school board's unwillingness to use Metro buses to transport high school students. The mayor sent a letter to the board, asking them to rethink the decision.

"That's one of the easier, politically, decisions.... If they can't do that, It's not going to bode well for the harder decisions that are going to be necessary," he said.

The mayor is advocating increasing affordable housing and mentioned several ideas for how to do so, including providing incentives for developers, financial support from the city's housing levy, and reducing the amount of parking required for development, which, he said, reduced the unit cost of such housing by as much as $25,000.

The mayor viewed Ballard's increasing density as a positive development but wouldn't provide specifics as to how that density would be served by a transportation network. He said that the department of transportation was continuing to conduct a study on improving north south corridors, specifically in Ballard and West Seattle, but couldn't say when the study would be published or what options it might include, beyond a possible Aurora Avenue express bus into downtown.

The mayor would also like to see a vote on which viaduct replacement, tunnel or rebuild, the public prefers. He said he's confident that the tunnel option would win such a vote and that the city can find the means to pay for it. Currently, the city and state are about $500 million short of paying for a tunnel. Nickels said options for securing the additional money include a regional ballot measure and possibly, contributions from the Army Corps of Engineers for the seawall portion of construction. He said Seattle could also be eligible for federal emergency relief funding relating to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.