The Delicate Art of Cost-Shifting

After examining the Port’s new summary cost estimate, we'd be interested in a more detailed analysis. In particular, we’d like to see a line item for stormwater treatment. Treating the runoff from the third runway is a huge undertaking. So much additional treatment capacity will be needed that it will take a big chunk of the current capacity of the Renton treatment plant to serve it. So where is the budget item for building or replacing that capacity in the Port’s cost estimate?

We bet it's not there. You see, the Port has taken up the delicate art of cost-shifting. That’s where a government agency can understate the cost of its boondoggles by shifting those costs onto the budgets of other government agencies. In this case, shifting them onto sewage bills that we get from King County.

Case in point: King County Executive Ron Sims and County Councilman Larry Phillips editorializing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer [link] trying to strong-arm Snohomish County into accepting King County’s controversial, billion-dollar Brightwater sewage-plant proposal, despite the reservations of Snohomish citizens. “Building Brightwater will free capacity in our South Treatment Plant (in Renton) so it can serve growth there,” opine the pair. That will allow residential and other growth that will so please the Boeing Company that it will want to build airplanes here.  So they say.

Sims & Phililips fail to mention that a lot of that freed-up capacity will be lost to third-runway stormwater treatment. That should be paid for by the Port and the airlines, not by ordinary citizens through higher sewage bills. And that lost capacity won’t be available for residential growth.