Category — Bridging the Gap

The Bridging the Gap road tour is over, and all the frisbees and blinking reflectors have been given away. However, there’s still time to vote on your favorite projects. (The Dept of Neighborhoods will be collecting votes through Sept 27th)

Of course, the sad reality is that the cost of the proposed projects ($239 million) is a tad bit more than the $4.5 million in funding that is available for these projects. Taking a look at the city’s list of projects, here’s my breakdown of the different projects (I may be off on my numbers in each sector by a tad, but hey, it was just me and my calculator putting these numbers together.)

* 65 proposed projects in the North Sector (looks like a minimum of $132 million in proposed projects)
* 26 proposed projects in the Central Sector (looks like a minium of $25 million in proposed projects)
* 59 proposed projects in the South Sector (looks like a minimum of $82 million in proposed projects)

It’s interesting to see that the Central Sector’s requests were quite a bit smaller than the North and South’s requests. Is this difference due to the fact that the Central Sector wasn’t aware of this project or could it be that the city has been making more of its infrastructure investments in the Central Sector?

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?

Starting next week, the Seattle Department of Transportation will be letting neighborhoods meet to sell the benefits of their proposed projects to the Bridging the Gap committee. It should be pretty interesting to see how these folks go to battle for their neighborhood’s projects, and whether there will be any consolation prizes for the losers.