Why do Mayor Nickels, the majority of the City Council, King County Executive Sims and Seattle downtown interests insist an elevated Alaskan Way Viaduct (Alaskan Way Viaduct) solution would be so terrible? The central waterfront segment of Alaskan Way Viaduct is only part of a regional transportation solution that connects north and south Seattle and communities.

(Councilman Nick) Licata, (House Speaker Frank) Chopp, and my state representatives, (Helen) Sommers and (Mary Lou) Dickerson, understand this much better than does the mayor, who seems to deny department of transportation engineering results.

I offer a couple of examples below.

I try to attend as many Alaskan Way Viaduct project public presentations as I can to view public relations hype and to carefully read the glossy Washington Department of Transportation handouts.

I attended the "Moving Forward in the South End" presentation in September 2007 and was appalled at the deception. Washington Department of Transportation claimed that removing elevated highway south of King St. would "work with any solution in the central waterfront, be it an elevated structure, a tunnel, or a surface option."

This conclusion is not true. It is proposed that State Route 99 will be elevated over the Atlantic Street corridor but then drop down to ground level side-by-side lanes. Hauling cargo up, then down, then up again onto a central waterfront elevated structure will not be an acceptable solution to most. Therefore, I think that Washington Department of Transportation really means that their South Holgate to South King solution will work with either tunnel or surface option on central waterfront and that they are removing elevated option by "stealth engineering." Shame on Washington Department of Transportation.

The mayor's assessment of the results seriously misinterprets the March 2007 vote. Yes, the voters emphatically turned down (70 percent to 30 percent) an expensive tunnel, and, yes, they did turn down the elevated replacement option as vilified in the media by the tunnel supporters, but by a much smaller margin (56 percent to 44 percent), but no, they did not turn down "any possible" elevated replacement.

They turned down the very expensive "bogeyman" elevated replacement highway option which was often characterized as requiring closing the viaduct and central waterfront for up to 10 years and which the mayor and tunnel advocates had hoped would scare people into voting for the tunnel.

Not all who chose "no, no" wanted a surface/transit solution; many wanted no money spent at all, many others wanted retrofit. Of those who didn't choose the "no, no" options, voters favored an elevated rebuild by a 3-to-2 margin.

The March 2007 election was essentially rigged because the mayor and tunnel proponents knew that a vote on all five options being considered would result in retrofit first, rebuild second, and disaster for any tunnel solution. Not all who chose "no, no" wanted a surface transit solution; some wanted no money spent at all, some wanted Elliott Bay bridge, some wanted under bay tunnel, many others wanted retrofit. In the run-up to the vote, advertising, endorsements, and interviews for the tunnel overwhelmed the meager budget for elevated, yet still the people rejected the tunnel. However because of the rigged (limited choice) vote he could spin the result to claim that people didn't want an elevated solution either but rather a surface/transit option. Wrong, as I indicated above. To read more, www.westseattleherald.com/articles/2007/08/21/interact/opinion/opinion.txt has an excellent analysis.

Following the disastrous (for the mayor and tunnel proponents) vote, Seattle Department of Transportation was ordered to hire the "consulting group." Moore Iacafano Goltsman, Inc. (Moore Iacafano Goltsman) to produce what resulted in the "Alaskan Way Viaduct stakeholder interview report."

This report was glibly presented but extremely biased.

- Point 1. They accepted the mayor's spin on the results of the March 2007 vote without comment.

- Point 2. Their survey/poll of 69 "stakeholders" allowed all five original plans that Washington Department of Transportation studied (chart on page 20 of the report), not the restricted vote that the mayor forced on Seattle voters.

- Point 3. They did not get a fair representation of voters. Most of the 69 stakeholders polled were already on record that any elevated solution would be "a deal breaker" by 5-to-1. This was open to anyone who read about it in the P.I. over several days, not restricted to a select few. Over 120 were passionate enough to vote; by a 30-to-1 margin, we saw either "fix it" (meaning retrofit) or "don't tear down the viaduct without rebuilding a better one." This is an exact opposite deal breaker than for the downtown interests but for twice as many people.Why was not also considered the P. I.'s Pulitzer winning Dave Horsey's Saturday Spin question whose results are at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/saturdayspin/18151_bqweb10.html?

- Point 4. If this was truly an unbiased study, they would have mentioned what most wanted before the mayor's vote - a state-wide vote ranking all five choices. After all, we are discussing State Route 99, a solution to regional transportation in and through Seattle.

I could go on, but I think these four points are enough to demonstrate that this Moore Iacafano Goltsman report had a predetermined outcome - to deny any elevated highway for the Seattle waterfront. This was a complete waste of money by the Seattle Department of Transportation or whoever really paid for it. Shame on (the department)!

Comparing the cost of any tunnel or surface/transit plan that requires shutting down waterfront businesses and island commuter ferry terminal with the cost of the "rebuild in place" (Washington Department of Transportation plan presented in spring of 2006) which permits the continued but lessened capacity use of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and thus the continued flow of taxes from businesses along the Alaskan Way Viaduct corridor that remain open during construction should demonstrate a huge win economically for "rebuild in place".

Don't let the convenience of a few greedy downtown Seattle interests disrupt regional transportation for Washington state.

The URL for the "AWV stakeholder interview report" presented at the 13 December meeting in Seattle Town Hall is http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/1BFB8062-F832-4DAB-A4A4-6F14B76ABD… .

Harvey Friedman may be reached via bnteditor@robinsonnews.com