Debt Free

There hasn't been a good, anti-overspending rant on here for a while, so here goes. To Seattle Mayor Greg Nichols, to steal a saying from John Stossel, “Give Me a Break!”. Mayor Nichols has been pushing to emulate the fine city of Boston with his own pet project, a tunnel to replace the aging freeway viaduct running along the city's waterfront. Now, many consider the viaduct a blight on Seattle's waterfront and want it replaced, lest it emulate the Nimitz Freeway in San Francisco in Seattle's next earthquake. It was damaged in the last temblor and will need substantial rebuilding or replacement at some point in the near future anyway.

The Mayor of Seattle advocates a, make sure you're sitting down, $4.6 billion tunnel as a replacement for the viaduct. That will really increase the public debt. Well, I guess the public coffers will never be debt free anyway. On the plus side, it would beautify the city's waterfront and open up many areas for parks and luxury development, ultimately increasing the city's tax base. On the minus side, the $4.6 billion dollar estimate is a joke. Just ask the citizens of Beantown how fast estimates of a project like this spiral into never never land once the project begins.

You can't get an accurate cost estimate on the substantial remodel of an aging single family residence, so don't try and tell me you can make it happen on an aging freeway viaduct, especially when you propose to bury it right next to a major body of water. Other estimates run as high as $11billion. Seattle could just buy a few nuclear aircraft carriers, complete with air wings, and have the fourth most powerful military on earth. Just in case everyone else in the country thinks this is a State of Washington problem alone, there are Federal dollars involved in the project too, so it affects everyone.

To further complicate matters for residents in the rest of the state, the fine Mayor of the Emerald City proposes to allow them the honor of assisting the city in paying for the project. Sensing that the Washington State's governor's recent demand that the project be put to a public vote may doom him to the less expensive alternative of a replacement viaduct, the Mayor floated a “Tunnel Lite” proposal. This tunnel is actually much less expensive than the original proposal, and that's a step in the right direction. Here's where government really shines. In attempt to pull the proverbial wool right over the taxpayer's eyes, they are claiming, with a straight face, that the new tunnel, which has 4 lanes instead of the original proposal's 6 lanes, will carry as much traffic as the original.

What??? How in the world is that remotely possible, providing everything else is equal? Reduce the size of the conduit 33%, but retain the original capacity. It sounds like they raised the estimate of the average speed that will be maintained in the tunnel and, lo and behold, out popped identical traffic capacity numbers. Never mind that the actual speed in the new, smaller tube will probably be even lower than the original proposal's, actually lowering capacity more than the lane reduction alone would suggest.

This entire viaduct/tunnel fiasco is occurring in a metro area where the governmental powers never seem to be concerned with traffic capacity, and rarely build anything for the future traffic flow. It's like pulling teeth to get any other projects approved that will approve capacity in the most cost effective manner. In many cases, they city, county, and state spend almost as much on environmental studies and mitigation as they do on the actual construction. In California you have much the same situation.

They have to get my “You're Full of Crap and Trying to Take Our Money” award.

In other news, and I'll be the first to admit I don't have all the information here, what the hell is the problem with our Federal Government, the President, and the State of Texas? Now, all you Bush haters out there don't respond with “That's where President Bush is from.” I'm actually referring to the situation regarding the two border patrol agents, Compean and Ramos, who were just convicted of shooting a poor, unarmed illegal alien drug smuggler in the ass while he was fleeing to Mexico.

I'm not a shoot first and ask questions later advocate, and I agree, what the agents did was totally wrong. Here is an area where we should actually spend more money. We should give the agents the additional range time required so that they could have improved their shooting skills, and hit the bastard in the head. That would have saved their fellow border patrol agents, or perhaps someone from the DEA, from having to confront this scumbag at some point in the future. It would also have saved taxpayers from footing the bill for a long, drawn out court proceeding, where the Border Patrol agents were convicted on the word of that solid citizen, the aforementioned illegal alien drug smuggler.

Now that the drug smuggler has been given immunity from prosecution in the smuggling operation that precipitated this whole sorry situation, he's free to return to Mexico. Now he can begin the whole process again, and you can bet he will. He should have just waited until the highway is built to Kansas City, then he could have driven a semi truck full of Mexico's finest up here.