I went to the Bridging the Gap presentation, and all I got was this frisbee, this blinking reflector, this notepad and some food.

So, yesterday I headed over to the Ravenna-Eckstein community center to check out the city’s ‘Bridging the gap‘ project nominees. The room was a lively scene of Dept of Neighborhoods, Seattle Dept of Transportation, and DPD staffers mingling with the locals. Each attendee was given a sheet to nominate their five most important projects in the NE Seattle zone (which I’m sure everyone selected by how close they were to their homes), and to also rank 40 other NE-area projects on a high/medium/low basis.

Remember, Bridging the Gap has a $4.5 million pool of money to spend on infrastructure improvement, but the projects I looked at were in the range of $100k to over $3 million. And all of these projects were important, most of them were designed to clearly improve safety for pedestrians. Now, the money shrinks down even more from there, on top of this there looked to be another 40 projects from the other two districts (South and Central). At this rate, it is conceivable that one project could suck up the entire pool of money.

Anyway, I think the money is great that it’s available but don’t think it is enough money to justify this publicity tour. I mean, the city spent some serious money on the staffers’ time, all of the presentation materials they put up, the food they brought, and strangest of all - these chatckis.

I mean, c’mon DON/DPD/SDOT, did you really expect people not to post an image of a frisbee with the words ‘Your Transportation Dollars at Work’ on it?