A route was dropped that would have run along Magnolia's southern waterfront near the Elliott Bay Marina, eventually connecting to 32nd Avenue West. Based partially on public comment, it was one of SDOT's top choices on the list, too.
But there was a problem: a big one that also highlights a failure of city bureaucracy and a shortcoming of institutional neighborhood memory.
Although SDOT didn't know it, a 1986 court settlement bars building any sort of vehicular access from the marina to 32nd Avenue West, said Kirk Jones, an SDOT consultant working on the bridge project.
Worse, there doesn't appear to be any way the city agency could have found out about the agreement, he said.
Patty Groesbeck did know about the agreement, however. She lives along the waterfront near the marina and was one of the original signers of the court settlement, which resulted from an appeal of the Environmental Impact Statement for construction of the Elliott Bay Marina.
Four of Groesbeck's waterfront neighbors also signed the agreement, along with the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Shorelines Hearing Board, the Puget Sound Alliance and the city of Seattle, Jones said. The Magnolia Community Club, a stakeholder of record on the bridge project, also signed the 1986 agreement, he said.
"It reads very clearly that there not be further [road] construction west of the marina," Groesbeck said of the settlement. "It protected one of the most beautiful beaches in the city."
The waterfront-route was one of 25 potential choices identified at an SDOT open house on Oct. 9.
"We showed it at that hearing because we'd heard about that [route] from several people," he said of stakeholders that included area residents and a combination of state and local agencies.
However, Groesbeck only recently learned of the proposal, and she showed up with news of the settlement at a Dec. 5 SDOT open house about the bridge project.
"And we said, 'Oh?''' Jones re-membered.
Jones searched but was unable to find a copy of the agreement in the SDOT files or at the city's Department of Design, Construction and Land Use, he said.
SDOT spokeswoman MaryBeth Turner said an in-house attorney for the agency was a signer of the original agreement. But the attorney didn't know the waterfront route had been added to the list, she added. Beyond that, there was no direct way to obtain the information at SDOT.
"Apparently, they weren't real handy on the shelf," Turner said of the documents.
The agreement is also missing in action at DCLU, conceded spokesman Alan Justad.
"We have a library, and we couldn't find it," he said. "But people think it might be around here."
Or maybe not.
"We do warehouse older things, and it may be this thing is actually in the warehouse," Justad said.
Groesbeck, a Windermere real-estate agent, had her own copy of the legal settlement, though, and she handed it over to Jones. He subsequently took it over to the City Attorney's office for review.
The City Attorney's office concluded the settlement was legally binding and could only be modified with the permission of all the parties who originally signed the agreement, Jones said.
That's not going to happen, according to Groesbeck.
"It was a totally horrible, unfair idea," she said of the proposed waterfront route.
Both Jones and Justad find it troubling that the 16-year-old agreement could not be located and that nobody remembered it in the first place.
"I do think there is a problem," Justad said.
But neither Justad nor Jones had any ideas on a readily apparent fix for the problem of keeping track of such old records. "I'm not sure what we could have done differently," Jones said.
Jones also noted that only preliminary work has been done so far on the $9 million study for the bridge project, estimating that only "50 to 60 man hours, if that much" were spent on the waterfront route.
"It's not that big of a deal," he said of the snafu. "I'm just glad we found out now and didn't have to spend any more time on it."
Jones also said that the agreement may have come to light as SDOT went through the process of searching for "fatal flaws." And the 1986 settlement is a doozy, conceded Turner.
"It's a fatal flaw if I've ever heard of one," she said, but Turner also credited citizen involvement for identifying the problem.
"It's reasons like this that we have public outreach," she said.
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