It felt like Kabuki, all preordained tragedy and exaggerated emotion, as the transit and City Hall suits headed down to the Filipino Community Center last Thursday for a penultimate face-off with the sneakered, pullover-clad residents of Southeast Seattle. In 11 days, the Sound Transit board was to decide on an alignment for its Northgate-to-Sea-Tac light-rail line, the biggest local transit project since streetcar days. As at previous hearings, the anger and alarm welled for hours at the prospect of 360-foot trains rolling at 35 miles an hour down the middle of
Martin Luther King Jr. Way, as proposed by Sound Transit staff, rather than via subway, as urged by nearly all audible opinion in the Rainier Valley. The outpouring peaked when one women, speaking through a Vietnamese interpreter, faced Mayor Schell and City Council Transportation Committee chair Richard McIver, broke into tears, and gasped, "What about civil rights? What about human rights? All we hear about are your rights!" Like all the other more distraught or vehement speakers, she got a big round of applause.
All this over a rail line that the Rainier Valley was fighting to get just 10 years ago. Then, as they had for three decades, planners wanted to send the trains down the Duwamish industrial corridor, bypassing the mixed-race, lower-income Valley for a faster link to the airport and South County. It's just that sort of past neglect that fuels the Valley residents' resistance to Sound Transit's present plans, and their suspicion of anything it or City Hall might have to say.
The essential lament at last Thursday's meeting was "Why are you only giving us this now?" "This" was the "Schell/Sims proposal" for a kinder and gentler at-grade route, tendered by Schell and King County Executive Ron Sims two weeks ago. Despite some sketchy details, it adds some appealing improvements and sweet- eners to Sound Transit's plan. Among these: reduce M.L.K. Way's planned 115-foot right of way to 93 feet, saving 49 of 103 homes and businesses the original plan would knock out. Raise $50 million from undisclosed sources for community de-velopment along the route. Install 12 more signals to let left-turners, pedestrians, and crosstown traffic through. Build the "potential" station at Graham Street—a no-brainer, considering what a commercial and Vietnamese community crossroads that's becoming. (More no-brainers: digging shells now for future stations at Beacon Hill, and Broadway and Roy.)
The question isn't only the usual one—why do such sensible ideas only arise at the last moment, when the public demands costly goodies like tunnels? It is: Why do officials only think of boosting development and assuring basic safety on a blighted low-income corridor when they want to run a train through? Despite the inevitable close encounters with screeching trains, M.L.K. Way probably will be safer with a rail median than it is now, when wide lanes, speeding cars, and few signals force project children to risk their lives daily. Not that the city has entirely neglected the Valley since then-Mayor Norm Rice dedicated himself to reviving it. It's just concentrated on the gentrifying Rainier Avenue corridor, and let M.L.K. go.
Train's a comin' through
As for preordained . . . the Schell/Sims at-grade scheme became the "Seattle 5 Plan" when the three other Seattleites on the transit board (McIver and County Council members Cynthia Sullivan and Greg Nickels) signed on. Fat chance suburban reps will oppose them and urge spending more money for a Seattle tunnel.
So at-grade seems a foregone vote. The more interesting question, even from the Southeast point of view, is what happens up north, on the 65th-to-Northgate leg, where transit staff also recommend an at-grade and elevated line (in keeping, once again, with topography), and residents likewise say, "No way." (The difference: They're mostly white and prosperous.) Sullivan proposes postponing this leg, which would free funds for South End mitigation. But if that leads to an eventual Northgate tunnel while M.L.K. Way gets trains, then the cries of "environmental racism" at the Rainier Valley meetings won't seem so unfair.
What's not on seattletimes.com
When The Seattle Times switches to morning publication, the breakfast table won't be the only battleground for it and the Post-Intelligencer. The two dailies are already competing for hits as well as subscriptions, now that the P-I is finally allowed a real Web site. This confers not only reach but legitimacy on the P-I. It's now a paper of record, according to the modern standard: It's electronically searchable. Last year the University of Washington's Northwest Collection, the last local library to do extensive indexing of local periodicals, stopped—and started telling clients to check the publications' Web sites. If it ain't online, it's lost to time. The Times had monopolized that role, with its searchable Web site and CD-ROM library archive; some out-of-town news junkies even got the idea it's Seattle's only daily. Now the P-I and, by chance, the Weekly have acquired search functions, and so saved their reportage from oblivion.
Still, as far as the public's right to know goes, online publishing is a mixed blessing. Many papers' Web versions are notably incomplete, even though I hear online researchers insist that they're getting the whole show. The Times' site seems less complete than the P-I's. For example, the February 4 seattletimes.com lacked five wire stories (from "North Korean Refugees Streaming into China" to "Religious Conservatives Interview Potential Republican Candidates"), 25 local, national, world, and business briefs, and all that day's syndicated op-ed columnists. The Web site does offer four news stories not in the city edition, plus a later break on Clinton's Senate trial, the past week's worth of science and health stories, and several years' selected big features and projects. That may be a fair trade for daily readers, but researchers to come will never know what they're missing.
What's on the P-I site
