Grace Crunican (b. 1955) served as Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation for eight years, from 2002 to 2009. She also has held key transportation-related positions in Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., where she was Deputy Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration. In this 2023 interview with HistoryLink's Dominic Black and Jennifer Ott, Crunican discusses the need to replace the crumbling Alaskan Way Viaduct, the political machinations that led to construction of a tunnel beneath downtown Seattle, the city's longstanding "Mercer Mess," and a monumental snowstorm with political consequences.
Learning about Transit and Justice
Grace Crunican: I started as an intern when I was with the mayor's office in Portland, Oregon, while I was going to college in Gonzaga and in my summer internships I worked on complaints for the transit mall and complaints about tall weeds and grass and other things in the mayor's office. So at 21, 20, I guess, so at the age of 19 or 20, I was looking at the interface between transit and the road system, looking at how a transportation department operated, what the various components were. And I was a volunteer, I didn't get paid for it, but I was able to see how the city government worked and how it didn't work, where it didn't work.
And Neil Goldschmidt was the mayor. He was a real activist mayor, had a lot of ideas on transportation and the role it could play in the city's development, how it could serve the people, how it could serve underserved people, low income people. He withdrew an interstate system and used the money to build a transit system. So in those two consecutive summers I learned a lot about how to get in and do the job, I guess, I would say. And then when I got my graduate degree, I worked with the city of Salem, Oregon as a legislative liaison while I was finishing up my master's work and saw cities being represented, saw the legislative session. I also worked in one of the legislative sessions. So it was fascinating to me. Public, private, city, rural, family has rural roots as well. So transportation has it all, Dominic. I don't know how you went into journalism, how you couldn't resist transportation.
Mayor Nickels’ Five Transit Priorities
GC: It was the 26th of December and it was suggested to me on the 23rd of December that I should meet the mayor of Seattle on the 26th. And I had a babysitter – my father – I was a single mother with two kids. I adopted my two kids, I don't know, a couple of years earlier. And so, I had a babysitter so I thought I'll take advantage of that. And so, I drove up to Seattle and I met Greg Nickels and Tim Ceis at a DoubleTree Motel at the airport. So they came south and I went north and I liked the combination of the two of them. The mayor had vision and I had a sense of what he wanted to do. He had five things he wanted me to do. He was very clear about that.
And the deputy was sitting next to him, his deputy mayor, soon to be deputy mayor, was sitting next to him on his little Blackberry, I think at the time, and typing away. And he went through the five things he wanted to do. The viaduct is one of them, Mercer was one of them. And he said, "I want you to put up the monorail – we want a monorail in Seattle." And so he finished his list and I said, "Mayor, some people think of monorails as nails on chalkboard to urban form." And the deputy looks up and stops typing away and he thought, “Oh.” Either he agreed with “Don't do the monorail,” and I wasn't saying “Don't do the monorail.” I was saying “Look, there's a lot of controversy about that, have you been in on that?” Or he thought that I didn't just say, "Oh yes Mr. Mayor, that's great. That's what we'll do."
So I think Tim woke up at that point in time because otherwise he was just sitting there doing his thing. So. I think they both liked me and I certainly, over eight years working with them, had a great deal of respect for the individuals and the combination of the two. They were very effective as a team.
Dominic Black: What were those five points?
GC: Take down the viaduct, fix Mercer – fix the the Mercer mess I guess, fix Spokane, help Sound Transit put in the light rail line and the monorail, I guess. Is that five? The monorail, Sound Transit, Mercer, Spokane and the viaduct.
DB: And Spokane was the Spokane Street interchange in SODO ...
GC: The bridge was up but there was a connection that hadn't been made. We put in a ramp at the Fourth Avenue ramp, we put the Fourth Avenue ramp so that if you were in West Seattle you didn't have to go all the way to I-5, you could actually get off and get onto the Fourth Avenue.
And Mercer, he said to me “The Mercer mess.” And I said, "I don't know what the Mercer mess is, I'm sorry." And he said, "Well we've got to fix that." And I said, "How long has it been a problem?" And he said, "Since 1962." And I said, "Jesus, you want to fix the problem that's been around for 40 years? You've got quite a big appetite." And he said it was messed up when the World's Fair came in and everything went sideways and it was. It was quite messed up. We have something in Portland that was messed up when the Memorial Coliseum was put in, similar. And so, I understood what he meant and then I really understood what he meant later – after I got in it, met with the constituents and that sort of thing.
DB: When you came away from that meeting, so you're driving back down I-5, Are you excited? What vibe are you getting from it?
GC: Well what I liked more than anything was the interaction between the two. We all had on our 2040 jackets, there was nothing pompous-y about the encounter. And I liked the communication style and I felt comfortable just telling him who I was and what I was doing and what I wasn't doing. And I told him I'd be questioning him on the monorail – be happy to be fair about it and go through it, but before you put up something with that many question marks around it. I didn't question the viaduct. I didn't question Mercer or Spokane or the light rail line, but I was certainly concerned about the monorail. So it turns out that's what happened.
But I was impressed with the two working together. I should also say, the chemistry was good because they were used to figuring out what they wanted to do and trying to go do it, and I like to be given direction. What is it we're trying to accomplish here? And then, don't get out of my way, but let me check in with you, but let me go, let's go do it. And so the co combination of the two of us was pretty good. The three of us, I guess I should say.
DB: How long after that did you come into office then?
GC: Well that was the 26th of December and I think the mayor took office mid January. I just packed up in Oregon. I went home, packed up, came up the next week, found a house, bought the house, off we go.
The Viaduct
DB: So let's talk about the viaduct. So when you were looking at the viaduct and the waterfront, what did you see?
GC: Well I didn't learn about the problems with the seawall part of the waterfront at the time until I got in at – excuse me – we changed the name to SDOT. It was C-TRAN at the time. So until I got into SDOT and we started working around, I didn't really understand the seawall part. And the project itself, the viaduct itself, was a broken down old freeway that was keeping the city from the waterfront and keeping the people from the water and making the connection in a obviously beautiful and environmentally – mandatory almost – connection between the city and the water. So it was like, “Get this out of here.” There was no need to study more.
You had a damaged freeway. If you'd had an undamaged freeway, it would've been a different situation. You'd look at functionality, what the other priorities are and everything else. But when you have a safety issue – and it was an old freeway, it's on the waterfront, it's got the sea air and that sort of thing, eating away at it too – it was clear that something needed to be done. It needed to be taken down. And I didn't draw a conclusion at the time as to whether you should have a tunnel or a surface option, but I certainly didn't think it was smart to put back the viaduct itself.
DB: What kind of research did you do in terms of looking at other ideas from Seattle's history about that space? I mean, did that inform any of your thinking?
GC: Well I knew about Skid Row and I knew about – actually just freeways in general. The US, a lot of freeways were put in – this was put in before the interstate system – but a lot of big highway projects were put in as an urban renewal project. So they were trying to get rid of the homeless, they were trying to get rid of what they considered an unblighted area. Many Black communities were gutted by freeways that were put in. So, you know…and it made sense from a route – not gutting communities didn't make sense – but when you look at drawing a line and where they wanted to go and everything, I'm sure it made some sense to get rid of stuff that was unwanted on the waterfront. But when you look at how obnoxious it was and if you just looked at the buildings that were right beside it and what it meant for those buildings and you stood down beneath it, you couldn't have a conversation down beneath the viaduct.
So when I came to the agency, I would say it wasn't well stocked with visionaries – SDOT – and it wasn't well stocked with a lot of energy. And so one of the things I did was ask around and get three people to act as what we called the three amigos at the time. But they were consultants that came to town and I couldn't afford to pay them full time, but they came to town every three months and just reviewed all of the projects in the city. And so, I asked them to look at other places and give us other examples. We were all clearly aware of San Francisco and what it had done and we were doing a parallel thing. At some point in time, we took a trip down to San Francisco and talked to the transportation people, the transit people, the mayor's office, that was in mayor at the time, Mayor Agnos I know was there.
So we looked up and had conversations with them and talked to them about their decision-making in the goal to take the viaduct down. So having these outside consultants that came to town and reminded you what your goals were, because as Director of Transportation you get sucked into every little tall grass and weed complaint, as I said earlier. So you got to keep your framework there. So that helped us keep our framework. Our staff grew, a lot of talent came in from other departments in the city, from other places. And we, I think, stimulated a lot of conversation and activity and then ideas.
Early Thoughts on Surface/Transit Option
GC: I wasn't locked into any one idea but at some point in time, we spent a lot of time looking at the surface option, which I think the Mayor and Tim Ceis didn't want to have anything to do with in their hearts. I don't know. They were very kind to me and allowed me to pursue that. But it was very good that we did because some of the connections that came from that – the Lander overcrossing and the Mercer connection – all came from pursuing what an aggressive surface option might look like. So that you would put the through traffic on I-5. Don't try and replicate that, but in terms of keeping a city open and pedestrians and bikes and cars, but pedestrians and bikes and transit, first and foremost, allowing that to go places.
When you asked about the viaduct, “What did you think?” When you really studied Seattle, all you have to do is look at the grid system and I think there were nine different grid systems in a very short period of time, and it kind of has a curvy or curvaceous look to it. It's got land up top, then it goes down to a narrow waist and then it goes out in the south end as well. And so the only two through streets are really I-5 and the viaduct, and there's several crossings at the cut, but they don't all match necessarily a through route into town. So it was incredibly important to understand that we had to maximize circulation of the whole system because the grid system cuts you off. It's very hard to figure out what you're doing.
I remember giving some speeches about Mercer and I said, "You know, you come off Mercer and you make a quick left this way and you make a quick right over here and you turn there, if you know to turn, and then you end up at your destination." Which you thought you were headed to when you got off the freeway, but it was a jolting experience if you weren't from around here. And that's kind of the way it felt if you were trying to get through the grid system in any one fringe part on the way through. Wasn't that easy. So in addition to taking down the viaduct, we had to provide a lot of circulation north and south and that took a lot of creativity. We had some really good folks help us break through, consultants and staff.
Surface Options Considered
GC: The state wanted, they started wanting the put the viaduct back up. There was a huge contingency for that. There was also a contingency for a tunnel inside the state, at some point. When I say contingency, I wasn't really thinking of political, I was thinking of the engineers that are there and they helped shape things. So there were a lot of people that wanted the tunnel or a replacement of the elevated structure. I knew we didn't want an elevated structure because it just went back to blocking the city, but I was pushing for a surface option to at least ... I think some of the consultants we had hired would've gone to a surface option period. One of the gentlemen used to be the former Planning Director for San Francisco. Maybe he was the Deputy Mayor at the time, I'm not sure. And he certainly thought a surface option was the way to go and I thought we needed to at least play it out so that we would know what it did.
DB: When you played it out, what did you find?
GC: I think we could have made it work, but there were a lot of conditions that went on that phrase "could have made it work." The truth of the matter is the traffic that was on the viaduct, there was a place to get off those lovely ramps. Was it Seneca? Spring and Seneca. Those were much like the Mercer experience I described to you. It's a little frenetic when you want to get off and without those connections, which is what the tunnel provided, the tunnel provided a through route, but you can't get off into downtown so you have to get into downtown by the north end or the south end. So it didn't provide circulation to the city, so once people began to realize that, they began to see that this didn't do much for those people inside the city that were trying to get to work there, but a surface option would do a lot for circulation.
So it was in that context that I thought it was good. In the end, as I said before, the information we gained by trying to increase the circulation allowed for all sorts of other things to happen in conjunction with the tunnel. So we were allowed to think about it. We were also allowed to think about something that was sloping down to the waterfront. And I think when you go from Pike Place Market down to the waterfront, I think that benefited from our work on the surface option.
DB: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'd not heard that articulated before that the research into the surface option allowed for a lot more creativity and solutions.
GC: The Lander crossing specifically, to help with the freight movement and I think it's Wes Mercer project, I don't know if it's even built yet, but allowing some connection there. All of those stem from it, as well as some, not just local connections on the end, but that whole concept of having streets end and not being able to go through, was a good refresher for us. There was a traffic engineer by the name of Rob Spillar who then went on to work in Austin, Texas, that worked for the consultant at the time and then he came to work at the city for about a year and a half and he left, but during that time he worked for the consultant and the city particularly, was the time he really got in. He's a very creative transportation planner. He's an traffic engineer, but he really understands the fundamentals and he helped us a lot with our thinking.
City and State
GC: Well, there were a couple of layers of communication. We didn't match up position for position, so I think there was a little bit of disconnect on how things work. Certainly the governor and the mayor were at the policy level. Doug MacDonald was the Secretary of Transportation. He had quite an ego and it was sometimes a little hard to get through, but we did.
DB: How would that play out? Can you give me an example of something like that with...
GC: Well, I think he thought that they were The State and he'd like to tell us how our transportation system should work since it was a state project. And Doug was very fun to be around – he’s a quick wit and all of that – but there wasn't a lot of listening that was going on to what the city was saying at the time. And we kept doing our research and kept working on our plans. I give a lot of credit to Ron Pananen, who worked for the state at the time, in terms of listening. He worked very well. There's one layer of people, they called it the RPs because their initials were all RP: Robert Powers, Ron Postuma and Ron Pananen. Ron Postuma worked for Metro, and Ron Pananen worked for the state, and Bob Powers was my deputy at the City of Seattle. And they met regularly and would keep looking at what the options were that were available, and used the consultants and the consultants would listen to them.
I teamed up with David Dye of the State of Washington and he had to report to Doug and I understood that. And so, I did my best to work with both of them. And eventually, at the top was the governor and the mayor and they would meet periodically. In addition to that, there was a community group of folks – Bob Donegan was on it and there was a bunch of constituents on it and Doug would address that group on a regular basis, quarterly or something like that, and when it got down to it more frequently than that, and we tried to work through.
So the staff would develop their ideas, bring them up to the political level and the political level included the governor and the mayor, but it also included this group of business people. And so, you'd oftentimes have presentations to both. Then people would come up with ideas: “What about this? How about the businesses they're going to get killed? We can't do that. We have to have a tunnel, we have to have the viaduct back.” Warren Aakervik had to have the viaduct reconstructed and had the reasons why. It took a long time, but it was a very interesting process.
DB: Your demeanor is very much someone who's based in the world of facts and research and so on, but my memory as a bystander, just as a member of the public, was that this was – these were very hotly contested ideas, right?
GC: Right.
DB: How did that impact your ability to do what you were trying to do? The tensions between the city and the state in particular I'm thinking about, but also between the different constituents who wanted tunnels and who wanted the surface option.
GC: Well Dominic, I think your video went out, but I used to run the Oregon Department of Transportation before I got there, so I knew the pressures Doug was under and I knew how it was to have a commission and a governor and a legislature. Every legislator had an opinion on this as well. Some of them were actually from the area that had an opinion. And so, it's just the process. You just have to submit to the process when you're there and you have to work the traps. You've got to go check with the deputy, check with the mayor, explain what's going on in the governor's office, use what contacts we have with Frank Chopp. At the time he was quite active in this project. And then we started … it was …
The hard part was that the state thought that they would just tell us what we'd do and that they'd go for the tunnel or something that we would like and then we'd be fine. And it just wasn't that simple. I probably didn't make their life any better by pushing the surface option as hard as I did, but there's a huge constituency in Seattle that if we didn't push the surface option and truly understand it and how it worked, we would've gotten killed on the other side later. So the tunnel kept some of them happy because – I don't think they would today – but it kept some of them happy because it at least gave us back the waterfront and gave us back access to the water. So they got that half-a-loaf. The state got its traffic down below as it were.
And I don't know how it's doing today. I would guess that it's probably not peak period. There's not a lot of congestion on the road because the numbers I saw made me think that the surface option could be pushed just probably to the brink, if you will, of what it could handle, but you didn't need it from a traffic point of view. And the state, of course, they had a state route so they had to replace the state route in the biggest city in the state. I mean, I knew it was an uphill battle, but…in Seattle, I don't think if we hadn't played it all the way out – and I played the role of forcing transportation officials to look at something they didn't want to look at – I think if we hadn't done that, they would've come back to bite us and we would've had lawsuits on the decision, as opposed to people got on board on the decision, which moves a project along considerably. The planning portion of most of these big projects is as painful as the construction is. That's been my experience in life and certainly it continues to be, so.
Why Surface Transit Option Was Rejected
GC: Well I think the mayor, he speaks for himself, but I think the mayor and Tim really thought that wouldn't work. They didn't want to trust that it would work, number one. So in our own team they were, as I said before, very gracious to me to allow me to play this out. But I think they were sitting there thinking, “OK, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, let's get on with the tunnel.” So they wanted a tunnel from the beginning, I think. Let them speak for themselves.
The governor's office or the State of Washington would be good with an elevated structure or the tunnel. And I think people were able to put enough doubts about whether the surface option would actually carry the traffic that it needed to carry. And I don't remember the purpose-and-needs statement exactly, but when you go into these environmental documents, you have a purpose-and-need statement. And so we probably had some obligation to carry so much traffic that was there. And so, the politics were such that the state comes in with, “It's okay to do the elevated or a tunnel,” and the city comes in with, “We'll go for a surface or a tunnel.” So your math doesn't take very much except that it's expensive to go for the tunnel.
DB: Jennifer, did you want to jump in there?
Jennifer Ott: Yeah, I'm trying to think of what my question is because this is super interesting. It's not what I expected you to say, which is always exciting when you're doing research. I guess the question I have is: one of the people we talked to, maybe Jared Smith, I'm not 100% sure, he talked about how for the surface option to really work, you needed to have an increase in transit or you would likely need an increase in transit. But then we talked quite a bit with him about how funding streams are such that you can't just move money from street funds to transit funds. And I hadn't thought about that before, particularly given the world we live in with the Eyman initiatives and how those limit taxing and there are real constraints, but I haven't dug into that deeply. And so, I'm just wondering if you have any comment on that. That idea that you would need more transit but there wasn't really the funding for more transit, and there were limitations that would block increasing that funding.
GC: Well the state gas tax, the constitution prohibits the use of it. It's not just hard to move it around. In Oregon it’s a gas tax and the vehicle reg fee. I think your vehicle fees can be used. There's some flexibility for them. So from the state's point of view, they didn't see where any transit funding would come in. The state itself hadn't gone to the federal government, applied for a Sound Transit grant or anything like that. I knew something about that from working on TriMet things when I was with the city of Portland. So I wasn't daunted by transit funding, but the Seattle region was putting in the light rail system and it was just one light rail system, right? It wasn't more than that. And that was considered monumental for them at the time. So there wasn't agreement as to what was going to go next. And I don't know if people thought people would actually ride it.
So you need federal funds, and then when you get federal funds you have to match them with the local contribution. So finding the local contribution probably meant going to the voters and asking for some kind of taxing mechanism related to sales tax or something. And the sales tax is coveted by the transit agencies that are there. So there was that problem.
And then there was the problem coming out of the state, and they said that the federal government just wasn't going to put that much money into the system. They thought that was ridiculous – that the viaduct would get that much federal funds. And that is one of the areas that – that's kind of what I do is, I'm a money person. I wasn't a planner or an engineer by training, but I worked on the appropriations committee in the Senate and I knew that drill and how things were done in Congress.
And I believe Patty Murray was a senator back then … and we hired, at the City of Seattle, a republican lobbyist because the house was Republican – it was controlled by Mr. Schuster. And so we hired Mr. Schuster's old roommate and I had known him from some rail stuff, actually. And we hired him to go help us get some money. And I remember we visited this staffer on the Senate side and I said, "We're trying to get some money." And he just said, "Grace" – I knew this guy because I'd worked with him before back there – and he said, "You're never going to get that kind of money back here. We got Republicans on the other side." And he just gave me this lecture and said, "You're not going to push the senator around and try and get her to do something that just isn't going to go anywhere."
And his name was Peter Rogoff. And so … I said, "Okay Peter, thanks, appreciate all that." And then we proceeded to get the biggest earmark in the house bill for 250 million dollars. And then that came over to the Senate and Senator Murray, wasn’t going to look like she couldn't give to Seattle less than what the senator from Alaska could give. Excuse me, the representative from Alaska. So we got our 250 million and the state of Washington was just shocked. But that money we got was for highway money to try and show them that we could find the money to build, that we shouldn't go with the cheapest amount of money. So we worked that committee because we wanted to say to them, “The feds will invest in this project and we need to get the right decision, not get the cheapest decision,” because the cheapest decision was the elevated system coming back. So that's my story on the money.
On the transit side, the reason that the climb is steep also, and I don't know if folks in Seattle really realize this, but Metro at the time – I don't know if they've changed much – Metro at the time was not very big on rail. They were very big on buses. They ran the bus system and all the rail was done by Sound Transit. And so, I found it very difficult to get them to ever say a kind word about rail. We were working on the streetcar too. That wasn't one of the mayor's big five, but he ended up asking for that too. And so, I don't know if Jared addressed this, but when it came time to find money for transit, if the transit you needed to find was rail transit and the person at the table was the Metro person, it was a little hard to get his bosses, if you will, to focus on the rail situation.
Ron Sims was the (King County) Executive and he certainly was an advocate for rail and he was on the Sound Transit board and he did a beautiful job introducing that system into the city. But the folks that work at Metro, they were quite skeptical of rail helping much. And I don't think people were interested in having a bunch of buses down on the waterfront. So I think it was unclear what kind of transit would actually help move the needle on the traffic that was going through.
So it was both the funding and then, where you got the funding bid in to the other transit agencies, and one of the two other transit agencies wasn't that interested in rail in the first place.
Process is Messy, Government is Messy
DB: Were there other … I don't want to use the word factionalism, but were there other kinds of those tensions or rivalries that you experienced in your time there that were challenging when it came to actually trying to get to your objective?
GC: Well, it's actually a much less complicated projects than some of the other projects that are out there. You have mostly one city, one state, one transit agency that was at the table. So it's just that everyone's interests were so different. I believe in public process and going through the process allowed us to get the best ideas forward, which is why I was grateful. I understood that other people didn't want anything to do with the surface option, but it's why I was grateful that the process allowed it because it allowed folks that didn't really have a seat in there, the elected officials that were there, there wasn't an elected official that supported that, but certainly there were citizens in Seattle that did support the surface option.
And so, there were a lot of business interests that supported the tunnel and a lot of business interests that supported the elevated freeway and some citizens who said they love the view up there. I have some very good friends that said, "Why are you trying to take that down? It's the best view in the whole city. When people come to town, we always take them on the viaduct." We worked through that, but I think, Dominic, you should expect the process to be that way. It is messy. Government is messy. Public decision making is messy and this changed the face of the city. It'd been that way ... When did it go up? When did the viaduct go up?
DB: '52, I think.
GC: I was going to say '55, so whatever. So it'd been up for 50 years and it'd been the norm. And who likes to change their habits? I lived in West Seattle. Man oh man, they hate this idea. They just thought it stunk. The only thing they got out of all these projects was a loop ramp on Fourth Avenue to get into town and that really helped, again, with the flow, that loop ramp. Oh that's the other one, the loop ramp, Lander crossing. That loop ramp was a result of the planning that was done on the surface option because that made Fourth Avenue allow you to go all the way through town and have some place to connect on the West Seattle side because before you couldn't do that. I think you had to go down to First Avenue or something. Yeah.
Time Pressure to Get Things Done
DB: So I have a question then about: you mentioned there the citizens of Seattle and people who were advocating for the transit surface option, and I think it was Cary Moon, Jen, you'll correct me if I'm wrong about this, who described feeling that they had been hoodwinked by Tim Ceis at the end of the process because they felt that the city was all in on the surface transit option, and then at the last minute the rug was pulled from under them. Jen, am I characterizing that correctly?
JO: Yeah, maybe they didn't think the city was all in, but more that the surface option in the second environmental impact statement was going to be fully considered. And then she felt like it wasn't that. I think it was that the purpose and needs statement disqualified it in the second EIS, but I ...
DB: But they were completely blindsided by that.
JO: Yeah.
GC: Sorry for interrupting. I can't recall the EIS machinations. I recall that the governor's office would have nothing to do with a surface option, period. And that I pushed the surface option from my point of view as far as I could. And it got rejected by the state. So again, I think the city could have lived with it if the state were saying viaduct or surface option. If that was the decision, then I think we could have gone with the surface option, but it's in the end how it came together. But I think we put out on the table – Cary Moon was certainly extremely helpful in getting the issue more fully vetted and having a constituency that stood up for it. But I think also, the mayor wanted to get things done and I think Ron Sims was leaving office as I recall, and the governor at some point was going to leave too. I don't know when she did exactly, so he wanted to get it done and get a decision made at some point.
And that too is an interesting ... I've also seen some big projects, just people have great ideas and you work them through and we can't get a conclusion so it doesn't get done and nothing gets done. And if nothing got done, we'd still have that viaduct up there and WSDOT would be spending some money, which you can do. I mean, you can glue anything together for the most part. It's just that they would've spent a huge amount of money gluing together something that wasn't doing us any good.
Big Snow Big Decision
DB: Did you then have any … I'm trying to get a grasp on your timeline then. When Mayor Nickels lost the election, does that automatically signal that that's the end of your tenure or had you left before that?
GC: No, it doesn't automatically signal, but I had become an issue because of the snowstorm. The decision for the viaduct was actually going on at the same time the snowstorm was. We had one meeting where the group of citizens we were working with – Warren Aakervik was one and I think Cary was another – it was snowing out and we had it there at the office, I remember, and people thought it was ridiculous that we were coming in because it was snowing. They all made it in, so it was like, “OK, let's keep going here.”
But we had decisions coming up and so … the citizens, I remember – two weeks out from the big meeting with the mayor and the governor – the citizens were coming in and I think maybe … maybe the mayor had already lost. I don't know, maybe this was the year before. I guess it must have been the year before. So the mayor hadn't lost at that point. But people were complaining because they'd had 16 days of snow. And because we didn't get the, what's called the CMA, it melts the snow down first. So there was a great deal of acrimony about that. I think it was just a couple weeks later that the governor and the mayor were supposed to meet in Olympia.
Anyway, I won't go through that story. And they canceled that meeting. They forgot to tell me. So I went to Olympia. I was on my way to Portland. I will tell part of this story. And so, I called Ron Judd and said, "Could I come into the capital because no one told me they canceled the meeting." And he said, "No, you can't." So I sat in the car with my two kids in the back of my Honda for two hours on the phone, freezing cold. And we finished this conference call and they decided what they were going to do then. And I don’t mean…I mean, they probably had to go through some other machinations, but it was a big come-to-Jesus meeting because Ron Sims, I believe, was the guy that was leaving at the time. And so no-one wanted to go back to the beginning, which whoever came in behind him, it was not a personal thing. It was more: it was hard to get this far in a decision making process with what was going on.
And I don't know how, Dominic, I got to this point in the ... What was the question? Sorry. I just thought about my poor kids and then I got just strewn all over the papers for not taking care of the snowstorm and I was actually taking care of it for 14 days straight. It was a 16 day snowstorm and I was gone for 72 hours to drive to Portland to put on Christmas with my kids and then drive back to Seattle. And all I did was get yelled at for being out of town during the snowstorm and I'd been there for 14 days. I only passed it over to my deputy for 72 hours and then ... Anyway.
DB: Is it hard to ...
GC: Thanks for the therapy session, Dominic.
DB: No, I was going to say, how hard is it to deal with that?
GC: It's not hard at all. It’s just, I was working really … we were doing the viaduct full time and we had the snow going full time and I had my deputy working on the viaduct as well, so that's why I took the snow job. And the other deputy, I think, was out of town. And … Santa was still in our lives and my brothers had helped Santa, and so all of our Christmas was in Portland. So in order for Santa to show up, we had to go to Portland. So you're a human being as well as a transportation director, but nobody cares when you're sitting in front of city council and they're making hay and trying to take on the mayor, so it's just part of life, kid. It's just the way it goes.
Citizen Voices Make A Difference
GC: I think you guys should put – you know, the role Cary Moon played to organize those people, the surface option would not have gotten its day in court without it. Seattle changed because of them. I mean, it really did. Projects were added because of them. And the waterfront is clearly there because of them.
And Warren Aakervik was probably the single biggest advocate for the viaduct. He was the face of the representation on that committee and they were so effective, they probably were overrepresented. There were several businesses on either end of, not on the viaduct itself, but way up in Ballard and over here. And they used it every day and they couldn't imagine anything else. And his vehicles can't go through the tunnel, I guess, they're HAZMAT or something. So it was a legitimate concern, but it got way more attention than it probably deserved because they were very effective, very effective at what they did. And maybe Cary Moon was more effective than she deserved to be, but I don't think so. I think the citizenry was behind her and I think the businesses were behind Warren.
So it makes a difference is what I'm saying. People's involvement makes a difference in the decision-making part. And there's a lot of civil engineers out there just like you and they're used to thinking about the construction phase of the project, not the decision-making phase of the project. And certainly in the decision-making side you have informed civil engineers there saying, "Hey, we can't do that, but we could do this," and thinking things through.
But this whole public and political process that goes on, there's a track that's environmental, there's a track that's political, there's a track that's funding. I put it up top because you got to go to the senators and things usually to get the funding. But it's an incredibly complex set, but a person can make a difference, can really make a difference. And I worked the inside of the system. Warren worked the outside of the system. Cary Moon was the outside of the system. Bob Donegan was the outside, but they worked the inside too. They all met with Tim Ceis trying to work his side of the deal.
JO: Yeah, it's actually been very heartening to hear you talk because I do believe in that public process, but people can talk you out of the effectiveness of it. They can tell you all the terrible things, but in the end, it's really good. I always compare it to when I-5 was built and we didn't have this public process and a lot of people were harmed and had no-
GC: In a lot of cities, not just this city, in a lot of cities.
Understanding Mayor/Governor Priorities
DB: Grace. I have one question I wanted to ask you and this goes to the thing that you didn't really want to talk too much about, which was a meeting between the governor and the mayor. Something that I am really … not struggling to get to grips with but trying to understand … is the push pull of the, I don't know if struggle is the right word, between the mayor and the governor through this period. How should I understand that as somebody who's been inside the system? How do that make sense of that?
GC: Well, don't forget, there's several layers. The governor has wheat to worry about the Palouse over in Spokane, and the governor's got to worry about the Columbia River and its impact and the Hanford nuclear plant. And she's got a zillion things to worry about. And believe me, no governor wants to spend their time on one project. I'm spending a little bit of time on the interstate bridge down here and I'm sure it's not one of Inslee's top five projects. And it's not Kate Brown's top five project in Oregon. So they've got a thousand things to worry about. And these little transportation projects are just ... everyone's a transportation planner. No one's a water pipe specialist, but everyone's a transportation planner because they walk, drive, bike, transit or whatever.
All those things that lobbied, she got lobbied on all those things as well. And then she has to wake up every morning to this legislative body and they're saying. “4 billion dollars? What about 4 billion dollars do we have in our treasury to put in one little smug-ass city up in Seattle that they suck the resources under the whole state on every other topic except agriculture. Why are we doing all this for Seattle?” That's the last thing that they want to fund. Frank Chopp, again, was speaker and that's fine. That was one vote. But it's not in her interest to do something that's going to piss off the whole state and piss off the city itself.
And so the city wasn't unified. The city had all these factions and so, it's not like she could just reach across the table and shake hands at the mayor and know that she'd get a big giant kiss from Seattle for doing this. Cary Moon didn't like it, Warren Aakervik didn't like it, others. And those are the most active folks and so they have constituencies behind them so she doesn't get rewarded very much even though they came to a deal on the tunnel. And so I think deep in their hearts, their pocketbook wanted the viaduct. I don't know about the governor personally, I don't know that she cares personally, to be honest with you. Or cared at the time.
But Ron Judd was her political advisor and Ron is the guy that's still around. You may want to talk to him or maybe you already have. And so, from my point of view, I think her biggest problem was, “How much money am I going to sink into this loser of a project? And is it going to stay? Can it really work?” The tunnel hadn't been engineered all the way at the time, of course, because you're supposed to do NIPA first. So the deal was that they would come to a conclusion and put a bow on the decision with Ron Sims still here. The reason there was a deadline at the end of that year, just 2009 maybe? Is that right? Is because Ron Sims was leaving and one of the triumvirate were moving on. So they wanted to cut a deal.
And I don't mean it in the worst sense, I mean it in the sense that we'd already taken longer than we thought we were going to make that. So instead of starting fresh, they said, “It's time to quit screwing around. Let's make this agreement. Let's agree on what we have to do to move forward.” So I think that was in everyone's interest to do that. I applaud them for doing it and they had to make a decision of some kind. And it's a decision that has stood the test of time in the sense that they didn't get sued and lose more time for that sort of thing on the decision-making side of things. And time is money in these projects. There's some projects that are out now with a burn rate of 50 million dollars a month. So let's take another six months and study it, 300 million dollars gone, period. And we didn't have it in the bank, so we were still earning our money.
So I think to some extent it worked as it should work. And I don't know that with extra time the city would've pivoted to a surface option to a viaduct and had it stand the test of time too, because I think the legislature would've come up and probably creamed us if we'd done with the surface option and we might've got stuck, as a city, with the viaduct. They tried to stick it to us, with the viaduct as a "transportation option." Air quotes. Some people far away didn't see the surface option as a transportation option. They saw kind of as a lefty place for people to walk and that it wouldn't take care of the vehicle traffic.
So it would've had a hard time in the legislature with a woman from up North, I forget her name. Anyway, from the tulip part of the world, she was representing. She was the Senate transportation chair at the time. I'm sorry I don't remember her name, but I'm not sure she would've been a happy camper when it came to the surface option.
So getting it funding is part of the reality that you have, and that involved leveraging the legislature into the discussion. And so they picked the most expensive option and they got it done. I'm not sure if they picked a cheaper option where you think they might want to go because it didn't meet their other needs of business and industry and stuff like that.
The Earthquake, The Seawall, The Viaduct
JO: Let me think. I guess, had you ever worked on a seawall project before?
GC: I don't know the answer to that. I'm trying to think if I had, but I'm from Oregon, so when I was a kid as I said, working in the mayor's office, there were the levees, the dams. When I was a kid, they were putting up the dams. And so, my dad's idea of a good Sunday afternoon was to take the kids in the car so mom could dig in the yard and we'd go up to the Dalles Dam and watch the fish ladder be built or watch the sewage treatment plant out in Washington County be built. Certainly the water stuff, it was not unfamiliar to me.
Why don't I just put on the record what I know and then you can go from there.
The earthquake happened and when the earthquake happened, what was C-TRAN at the time went down and tested the seawall to make sure it was still going to stand. And when they did bores, they found major hunks of the bore, if you will, there was nothing there. And there was supposed to be boards there already. You guys already know that the sea wall isn't a two-foot-wide structure that goes like this. It's the whole platform and the retaining wall and all that stuff. So the boards that act to hold up the seawall itself had come loose, and they would move with the tide and the little teredos and the gribbles had eaten away the platform that held it up. And it's also the platform that connects it with the city. So the city's here, this structure, supposedly a structure, is here and then there's this seawall. And they'd already replaced the seawall with ekki wood a while back thinking that would last and the little animals dug right through the ekki wood.
And so, they stopped boring because they were nervous that they were actually maybe adding to the problem at the time. And we started talking about the seawall, and the state had sympathy for us in the sense that they were sorry we had this problem, but they weren't going to put any money into it. And so we had to go get money for the seawall as well. And they went out, I think in 2012, with an election for that. But the seawall itself was such an integral part of the state's thinking. And if we did the tunnel – that's probably another good point back to the viaduct – if they did the tunnel, that would help us with the seawall because we'd have to fix the seawall in order for the tunnel to take place. So I think there was some justification there for the two to go hand-in-hand from the city's point of view and get it taken care of.
Whereas if you did a surface option, you wouldn't necessarily have to do the seawall, except that the surface option sat on top of it, if you will. But it structurally, wasn't necessary. So what was interesting was watching people come to understand – it's always a great thing when a public education comes about as a result of some of these major projects. And so people began to realize how complicated this whole project was and how essential it was to the businesses that were out there, the Bob Donegans of the world, that owned something out on the water.
And then the concept of global warming was coming into play, climate at the time. And so people realized that we were going to have to build a seawall and probably build it taller than we could. And so we'd need today, but we would need it for tomorrow, if you will.
And so I think there was a lot going on there. We also worked hard on the seawall to design something that was fish friendly and that provided lots of little spaces. And I understand that fish have come back and are actually using that. But it's a great thing when you can capture some of that stuff for the public and get out to some of the schools.
And we would talk to folks about the intricacies of the seawall, but it was, again, another financial burden on the city to come up with its own money there. And then I think the working relationship between the state and the city when they went to build it was actually enhanced because of all the time we'd spent with the state on the viaduct. We didn't just walk in and say, "Hey, we need to take care of the seawall." Those people that were involved in the construction knew the same people that were going to be involved in the construction of the seawall itself. And we'd had that working relationship.
So there were various parts done at different times. They would coordinate where Bertha was in the process. This was after I left, but I know they would coordinate where Bertha was going to be and then what they were going to try and do as a seawall crew. So sometimes that cooperation doesn't exist and there's a lot of finger-pointing and when something starts to slip, they're like, "Well, that's his problem." "No, it's her problem." And that didn't happen here.
JO: That's interesting to think of the seawall as a standalone project would've been harder to fund – because that was the original case in the '30's is that it was a standalone project and the state had no direct interest in it. And so, there was no reason for them to help fund it until the depression, of course, made it a great work relief program. It's interesting that they would tie together like that in this iteration, and I can see how that makes it much easier.
GC: Well, and if the seawall failed, the viaduct was toast. So the state began to respect the contribution the city was making to things by taking care of the seawall. While I was still there, we had this report, I just remember this so well. Ron Pananen was with the state at the time and someone called and said, "A guy just fell through the sidewalk." And I said, "What?" And he said, "Well, he got stuck in the sidewalk. The sidewalk gave way." And I had this eager beaver who worked for me, who shall remain nameless, and I knew he was going to race himself down there and throw himself in front of the media cameras because that's just the way he is. And it was not clear that it was our fault and we were already in trouble because it was very close to the end of my tenure.
And actually, it was before the election, but you know I'd been there seven years and I called up Ron Pananen and I said, "Ron, could you just get down to where this guy fell to the sidewalk and just say, 'We're working together to try and get him out' because my guy's going to show up with SDOT on his chest and take the blame for it. And we politically can't handle any more stuff." Well it turns out it was a state sidewalk, but we didn't know that until the next day we, at the time. And he beat my guy there and he put himself and he said, "We're working ..." And that was the story. It was done. It wasn't another screw up by SDOT or something, which it wasn't.
But anyway, it was because we worked together so long that I could say, “Look, we're in the soup today. You'll be in the soup tomorrow. Would you just get down there.” And he just raced down and took care of it. Anyway.
