Q. In a perfect world, Richard, what would you support?

A. I still think the Surface Transit would work, which I originally supported. But I recognize there are risks to it. And I think that train has left the station.

Q. Is there still any wiggling going on re this issue — the mayor’s latest request [for the City Council to reject the tunnel]?

A. No. I don’t think so. I don’t think we heard anything new from him. We’ve been following our own course, and we have concerns. We recognize there are risks we have to deal with. We expect that the contract we wind up with will be stronger than the one negotiated by the mayor [previous Mayor Greg Nickels].

Q. Are the tunnel estimates realistic? The Big Dig will wind up costing $22B with interest and won’t be paid for till 2038.

A. Yeah but that was 23 miles of totally reshaping a whole stretch of area with all kinds of diversions and parks.

Q. Costs were related more to what they did not foresee. The cost overruns dwarfed the initial estimates of the entire cost of the project and were the majority of the final tab, all because there was too much winging it and acting on faith. It’s a little like what we’ve run into with BP, the government giving them free rein because BP said they could handle any leak.

A. I would rather analogize it to the things we’ve done here. We bored a tunnel through Mt. Baker ridge, that came in under budget. We have a tunnel we’re digging from downtown to University for Sound Transit, that came in 20 percent below the engineering estimate for the bid. It’s actually much more complicated than the one through downtown, it’s twice as long because it goes under the ship canal, Vancouver did a six-mile tunnel for their light rail system that came in on budget and it’s ahead of schedule, in [King County's] Brightwater three of the tunnels are finished now, they’re actually 1 percent above the cost, but they were bid at a very expensive time, the other one is stalled but it’s not clear if that’s going to incur any costs for King County because the insurance will probably cover it. The Beacon Hill tunnel, the tunneling actually came through pretty much on budget, but the station had a lot of problems and was more expensive. But this one won’t have any of those kinds of issues.

So the costs that we know about for bored tunnels are not bad. This is very known terrain for Seattle, we’ve already got a bored tunnel through for the Burlington Northern, we’ve got a bored tunnel for the drainage system, we’ve got a lot of stuff under downtown.

Q. At the end of the day, you’re comfortable?

A. I don’t know if I’m comfortable, but we’re not in Big Dig territory. Certainly there are issues that could happen, but they don’t feel to me like they’re going to be big kind of risks.

Q. Doesn’t the fact they’re sticking Seattle with cost overruns indicate that the Legislature is more worried about them than you seem to be?

A. It passed the Senate by a vote of 41 to 8 [note: 43 to 6] or something like that, then it came to the House and Frank Chopp was messing around. Chopp of course supported replacing the viaduct. He introduced this cute language and his goal was to force Seattle legislators to vote against this language and whip up the anti-Seattle spirit around the state so he’d be able to defeat the legislation. What happened was enough Seattle legislators realized the game he was playing, looked at the text he had, and realized this was not a meaningful statement and might cause the whole thing to go down. So that’s why we wound up getting it passed. And the House vote was actually only 49 to 47. It was just a game being played on the last day of the legislative session, and you know what happens on the last day of the legislative session, everybody tries to wiggle something in in the hopes they can slide away with it because everybody wants to go home.

Q. And will it hold up legally?

A. Pete Holmes [Seattle city attorney] is very clear it will not. And the risk of reopening it is if you really had a mad Legislature, especially one with more Republicans which we’re likely to get, you open it up and who knows what happens? They might actually decide to write something enforceable.

It’s such an odd set of political parameters, and the bottom line is we’re better off dealing with what we know and what we’ve got than putting ourselves back off into the unknown. There might be something better we could possibly get, but the odds of that are so low. I don’t think it’s worth it.

Q. Some City Hall watchers say you’re trying to be the anti-McGinn. Any truth to that?

A. I met with Mike after the election. I said this is so great, we’re environmentalists, we can work together, you can be Barack Obama and I’ll be Nancy Pelosi, we can work together and really get things done. I don’t know what it is with Mike. I’m really unhappy and very sad about what’s happened. I really wanted him to succeed. I don’t know what’s gone wrong.

Q. Does this go beyond communication issues?

A. It feels to me like he’s approaching it as a lawyer and advocate rather than someone who is actually running the show and needs to figure out how to make it happen. And I don’t know if he can get out of that role.

Q. Do you agree with McGinn on some things? What about Walk Bike Ride?

A. I’m all for that, I’m interested in getting light rail to West Seattle. The family education stuff he’s doing, we have no conflicts on that. I just wish we could get past these two transportation projects [tunnel and 520 Interchange], I don’t see why we can’t agree on more things. I’m really unhappy about this. 520 is pretty much done but he screwed that one up for awhile too.

Q. On the tunnel equation, for all our skepticism, we hope you’re right.

A. Well, I’ve been wrong before. Sometimes when I’ve been wrong I’ve been really glad that I lost. But you never know.

For further reading:

Cary Moon (People’s Waterfront Coalition): “Why I continue to oppose the deep-bore tunnel.”

City Councilman Mike O’Brien’s opposition to the tunnel: “The $4.2 billion estimate is at best a hopeful guess.”

The unfathomable nightmare of the Big Dig.

Seattle Times: “McGinn hires own consultant on viaduct.”

Seattle Times: “Conlin makes pitch for tunnel.”

Publicola: “Parsing Conlin’s Tunnel Pitch.”

Richard Conlin’s sustainability-packed biography.

When Mayor Mike McGinn, an environmental lawyer and bike commuter with sustainability credentials as unimpeachable as Conlin's, took office in January, we were ecstatic over the prospect of a united green front to tackle mounting challenges facing our region. Finally the mayor and Council could move together on transportation issues to lead Seattle toward a post-carbon future.

So we were at first puzzled and have become increasingly dismayed with the bitter standoff between Conlin and the mayor over what we consider to be a defining issue for Seattle's future, the Deep Bore Tunnel project to replace the deteriorating Alaska Way viaduct. Having seen city after West Coast city make the call against car dependency and in favor of livable waterfronts, we've been inclined to support the Surface Transit option — a boulevard along the waterfront, with former viaduct traffic using the boulevard or finding alternate routes. The surface option is admittedly not the fastest way to move vehicles — but then, in a post-carbon era, the whole point is that the car is no longer king.

The more people we asked about Conlin's position, the more we found expressing similar consternation to ours. Surprisingly, we could find no public exploration of precisely why he supported the Deep Bore project, given his green credentials. When Richard returned from vacation last month, we asked to meet with him. Last week, between a meeting on bike sharing and the wake for the South Park Bridge, Conlin laid out his philosophy on the tunnel. We give him credit for compelling arguments and the humility to admit that for all the obvious work and thought he's put into his position, he could be mistaken.

From the get-go Richard took us by surprise. The $4.2 billion Deep Bore Tunnel through downtown Seattle, he said, is the "green" solution.]

Q. How do you reconcile your longstanding sustainability views with support for the tunnel?

A. I actually see it as the green alternative.

Q. In what way?

A. We’re trying to create a great waterfront park that’s going to make a huge difference in terms of the type of urban environment we have. And we’re trying to put in a transportation system that’s going to serve the urban center effectively and efficiently. So how do you reconcile these? It comes down to: Creating an underground corridor takes your traffic away from the waterfront and keeps it going through the city while you create an urban waterfront center that you’re looking for. I see that as good management strategy. And soaking up all that gas-tax money in the city actually really helps us prevent roads from being built in some of the places we don’t want them being built.

I’d add that from a climate perspective we’re reducing a six-lane highway to a four-lane roadway — that’s a significant gain. It’s not creating new capacity. I don’t know any other city that’s actually taken a central freeway and slimmed it down like that.

There’s clearly an embedded carbon impact from the construction. That one’s really hard to compute, I don’t know exactly how to deal with that. Probably if you amortize it over the 100-year lifespan it’s not that significant.

Q. Other cities have livable waterfronts without an underground tunnel. Do we have to have both?

A. Portland just moved their freeway traffic over. Here we’re building something as well, so why not a tunnel, what’s wrong with that?

Q. They still have traffic congestion, it’s just the nature of the beast that when you accommodate traffic, you get more. In San Francisco, the surface traffic kind of figured it out and went elsewhere. They all have far advanced rail as well. None of these cities escape traffic problems, but they also don’t have the crushing expense of the tunnel. The Bicycle Master Plan has $75 million in committed funding, less than 2 percent of the tunnel cost, with no clear path to getting full $240M financing. We can’t afford to make even minimal infrastructural improvements for bikes — the greenest alternative to cars — yet we continue to put ourselves into deep debt for the dubious cause of car dependency.

A. Vancouver is lucky because they never had freeways, they never created them. They have the advantage of being at the end of the line, so things don’t go through Vancouver.

Q. North Vancouver is an emerging problem. Again, Vancouver has terrible traffic. But it manages to get by.

A. But Vancouver made the decision initially not to build freeways through the city. And we’ve created [in Seattle] an infrastructure that’s going to take time to reshape. The San Francisco model is not as apropos, because we’re dealing with a through route, whereas they came off elevated [freeway] and sent traffic down onto surface streets. So it’s not quite the same model.

The model I think would be interesting to imitate is Seoul, Korea, where they had a freeway that was over a stream and they took the freeway down and re-opened the stream. It was really cool. But they also had a lot of additional construction, you can’t separate the fact they took down [a freeway] with building all these other roads around there.

I’m not sure any of those are quite the same situation we’re dealing with. And from the cost perspective, the surface option was $3.2 billion, and this (tunnel plus surface) is $4.1B, so that’s still a big difference, but it’s not $4B worth of difference. And most of that is gas tax, and gas tax can only be used for highway purposes. We can’t get it for things we’d like to get it for.

Q. In terms of prioritization, though, moving cars instead of funding bike improvements?

A. That’s something we need to do. But because this is the state’s project, things aren’t fungible. And that’s the second point I wanted to make, which is, what would happen if you said no, we’re not going to do this [tunnel] now? There’s really three possible outcomes that I can see.

Outcome No. 1 is you would be able to get a surface option. It would save you some money, but there are some risks to the surface option. Could that $500M investment for I-5 actually be done [adding a lane to the Freeway]? What other problems are likely to emerge if you have to deal with the changing lanes and so forth? How much traffic are you going to wind up with on other city streets? So there are risks to it.

Option 2 is that the state decides to go ahead with the tunnel, and in that case your risk is any further delay or other problems are likely to drive up the cost and create more cost overruns.

The other option is that the state says to hell with you, Seattle, we’re going to rebuild the elevated because that’s cheaper. So the question is what is the probability of one of those things happening and you wind up in a poisonous relationship with the state, which is also problematic for all kinds of different reasons.

My assessment is the risk is pretty high they’d pursue an elevated. They might stay with the tunnel, the governor is pretty committed to it, and we’d get the same thing we have anyway but it’d probably cost a lot more.

The chances that the state would actually fund the surface option — it would be pretty revolutionary for that to happen. Other people read it differently. But my perspective is that’s the risk of getting something worse than what we’re being asked for.

Q. Still, we’re looking at a project that the citizens of Seattle repeatedly have said they don’t want.

A. That’s not true. They voted down a cut-and-cover tunnel and it was an advisory ballot, it was totally screwy.

Q. We elected a mayor that made it the centerpiece of his candidacy.

A. I think there’s a very good argument to be made that they wouldn’t have elected him if he hadn’t said he was going to go along with it. You can interpret election returns any way you want.

Q. Mallahan was not a question-mark, though. He was 100 percent for the tunnel.

A. My argument is this is Seattle. You have an environmental leader who led the parks levy campaign, a neighborhood advocate, had the endorsement of most of the major organizations in the environmental and democratic communities, opposing a corporate executive who hadn’t even voted in most Seattle elections — McGinn should’ve gotten 75 percent of the vote.

Q. Well, they were both unknowns (in terms of elected office).

A. You can argue these things till the cows come home, you’ll never know what the voters were thinking.

[Part 2 tomorrow: "I'm not the anti-McGinn."]