Danny Westneat gets it wrong. He takes Mayor Nickels, the Seattle Council and Governor Gregoire to task because the Seattle voters will have an opportunity to decide how to repair/replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He wants the politicians to lead.

Yes, the politicians should lead, but they should also listen to the people instead of acting like spoiled brats. Here’s a few bits from Mr. Westneat’s column.

Maybe the 13th time will be the charm.

Once again we the people get to decide a major transportation issue — the fate of Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. It was thrown into our laps last week by the governor and the mayor and the other decision-avoiders we’ve hired to shirk their duties around here. This vote will be our 13th in a decade on transportation. We have voted twice on light rail, five times on monorail, twice on gas taxes for road building and three times on Tim Eyman transportation measures.

How are you feeling about all that voting? Gotten much out of it?

Yes, we are a populist state. Voters here like to have a say. But all this saying is getting in the way of any doing.

Gov. Chris Gregoire was correct when she said we’re having a tough time agreeing on what to do with our shaky waterfront highway. But then she and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels copped out.

“The only way to break the logjam is to have a vote of the people,” she said. “It’s the only viable alternative to doing nothing.”

If that’s true, then what are the politicians for? Isn’t this the very job we hired them to do — to break political logjams? To give here and get there, to bend some arms and scratch some backs and somehow come up with something? Anything?

Instead, they want us to do it. So they don’t have to.

We barely have a representative democracy anymore. The representative part has checked out. The democracy part may look like it’s in full swing — there’s certainly a lot of voting going on — but it isn’t leading anywhere.

Of course Mr. Westneat’s solution is for the politicians to make the decision without regard to the will of the people. He tells us an anecdote about jury duty…

I remember the last time I was on a court jury. There was not a professional problem-solver in the group. We had to decide if a guy had stabbed another guy in the stomach.

Some witnesses had been so unreliable that we argued for days and couldn’t reach a verdict. We told the judge we couldn’t do it. It’s a logjam, we said.

“No, that’s not acceptable,” said the judge. “Try harder.”

In the end, we haggled four times longer than it had taken to try the case. We unanimously voted to let the guy go free, even though we knew he was probably guilty.

Which is what you should have done in the first place. The standard of proof in a criminal case is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. If the issue was in so much doubt that you couldn’t agree on it after several days of arguing, there must have been a reasonable doubt as to the guilt or innocence of the accused.

It was messy. Some on the jury had backed down from strongly held convictions. Nobody felt proud. But we had done the one thing society was depending on us to do. Which was make a decision.

Governor, mayor, lawmakers: Try harder.

I think that the Governor is right on this one and that Mr. Westneat is wrong. Yes, we need leadership from our representatives, but not the kind of leadership Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council have offered.

That crew of spoiled children has made it clear that they don’t represent the people. Instead they represent their own selfish interests and desire to build a monument to their names. The Seattle City Council doesn’t trust the people to make decisions when it comes to spending money, because they’re afraid the people will want their money spent wisely.

After all, they want a tunnel. When it turned out that the tunnel was going to cost way more than they figured they decided the people shouldn’t have a say, because the people wouldn’t want to spend that much money. They knew what the people would want, so instead of representing the people they decided to represent their own selfish interests.

They’ve threatened to drive up the cost of any option other than a tunnel by slowing down the permitting process and with regulatory impediments. This crew doesn’t represent the people. Instead they’re a bunch of spoiled children, and they’ve threatened to take their ball and go home if they don’t get to make the rules.

Governor Gregoire has decided to be an adult, and let the people decide. Danny Westneat has decided to be a child and whine that he doesn’t want to have to think about it or to take a stand for what he wants because it’s too hard.

Previous Posts:

• Governor: Give Voters the Choice
• King County Council conflicted over morality
• Mayor Nickels ready to act like spoiled child
• Seattle City Council among reasons viaduct cost could rise
• Do we need another big government agency for transit?
• More drivers, more time in gridlock

Cross posted at Perri Nelson’s Website

Update: The original version of this post did not include a link to Mr. Westneat’s column. This update corrects that.

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