Request for more public comment presented to Bellevue City Council for greater public participation in presentation of final ARUP Study results
On Monday, June 20, 2011, BBB spokesman Joe Rosmann presented this speech to the Bellevue City Council:
I am here this evening representing the many Bellevue citizens, and supporters of Building A Better Bellevue, who deeply appreciate the commitment of this Council to support both neighborhoods and our business community by upholding our city’s very long term policy in favor of siting light rail along side the 405 corridor.
My comments are brief this evening and are related to the upcoming meeting on June 29 where ARUP and our city staff will finally present to the public the results of our City’s special study regarding the Council’s B7R route preference.
BBB’s supporters have many questions regarding the way in which the findings of our city’s ARUP study are being portrayed and discussed, long before a final report has even been completed.
A month ago Sound Transit staff presented their own summary of our city’s study, which at the time was still only in an interim form, to the Sound Transit Board, using their review as evidence to claim that the city’s preference was far too costly, based on our city’s own work. Immediately thereafter reports began appearing in the press claiming that the cost of our city’s preference would make a downtown tunnel impossible.
Other experts who have been examining the preliminary findings of ARUP’s work are drawing different conclusions from ARUP’s work than those being portrayed in the press. In doing so they have also identified many questions regarding critical technical elements of our city staff’s work with ARUP, as well as with ARUP’s own draft statements.
Something has clearly gone awry with our City’s management processes, if such preliminary findings of what has only been an interim document, can be so easily manipulated to support only the position of Sound Transit, and its supporters.
The public deserves a very different approach for considering and discussing the results of ARUP’s work than has been utilized in the prior two public meetings to date.
The public was forbidden, at these two meetings, from addressing either ARUP or our city staff before the rest of the public as a whole. As a result, Bellevue citizens lack information of the scope and variety of concerns regarding the assumptions and judgments made both by ARUP and our City staff, as are being raised by other transportation planning experts.
The public also does not understand the very extensive efforts that have been made by Sound Transit itself in seeking to:
• Direct elements of the study in such a way as to add to the costs of the B7R route, as well as to
• Complicate the construction of the city’s design preferences.
BBB’s leaders and our supporters call upon this Council to require that the session on June 29 provide for a formal oral question and answer process where members of the public can question both ARUP staff, and our City staff regarding important aspects of this study.
Also, let us keep in mind that, so far, Sound Transit has refused to discuss the massive environmental implications of its B2M route plan for building the train IN THE SLOUGH, not on Bellevue Way/112th, as has been inaccurately stated by the press and by another group that supports this route. Sound Transit has also refused to answer how they will mitigate for the noise which to date they cannot mitigate in Tukwila or in Rainier Valley. Sound Transit has also refused to disclose the real costs of all this, as well as other mitigations that will be required to construct and operate their B2M plan.
The public deserves to know all the truth, not just those facts that our city staff, and/or Sound Transit leaders would hope to prevail in the public’s mind.
Thank you for listening.
~The Building a Better Bellevue Steering Committee