Building a bridge to justice

By David West

On June 30th, Seattle’s South Park bridge was shut down without a replacement, thus leaving an entire community cut off from the most direct routes to the rest of the city. Rerouting plans and the resulting congestion at key intersections will hurt workers, business and low-income residents from a much larger area than just South Park. The South Park Bridge serves tens of thousands of residents and business in the Duwamish Valley and South King County every day. Buses using the bridge bring union workers to downtown and take families to social and health service providers in and out of the area. Manufacturing workers and small businesses rely on the bridge as a key connection between communities, workplaces and suppliers across the Duwamish.

Puget Sound Sage and members of the New South Park Bridge Coalition consider the failure to replace this valuable bridge a grave injustice to the South Park community. The South Park community, along with the unincorporated areas south of the bridge, is disproportionately low-income and is considerably more diverse than the larger region. Replacing this vital transportation link for communities of color, immigrant families and other working families in our neighborhood is not only a sound investment in our regional transportation infrastructure. It is a matter of social, economic and environmental justice.

Although the decrepit condition of the South Park bridge has been well-known for years, securing funding for a new bridge has always been a low priority. The federal TIGER funds have been awarded to rebuild the Mercer Street corridor. State funds have been allocated or promised for Link light rail, the downtown tunnel, and various other infrastructure projects. None of those projects is as critical to a single community as the South Park bridge is to South Park and the Duwamish Valley.

This year may be the last opportunity for many years to secures Federal funding. Our local governments must successfully apply for Federal TIGER funds or a new bridge is likely never to be built. Sage and its community allies recently met with Port Commissioner John Creighton, after which the Port of Seattle committed $5 million to the bridge. With the Port’s commitment, local and state governments have now pledged $70 million of the $130 million needed for a new bridge. King County will now ask the federal government for the remaining $60 million to start construction.

Too often under-valued low-income neighborhoods get pushed aside for funding. This year, elected leaders got the message: South Park and the Duwamish Valley deserve a transportation infrastructure comparable to that available to the rest of the city.

David West is Executive Director of Puget Sound Sage.

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