After a public hearing last Thursday that was packed to the gills with pro-Arena supporters, the King County Council is aiming to put the pressure on Seattle's city council to make a vote. The County Council could vote as early as next Monday on whether or not to invest up to $80 million into a new basketball arena.
If the King County Council votes yes on the budgetary matter, it would tighten the clamps on the city council to put the matter to a vote, rather than hold more public meetings.
Arena plan pushed to full County Council vote | Local News | The Seattle Times
The City Council is still pouring over the arena proposal and looking into criticisms and fears from the Port of Seattle, which has also come under fire for relying on old and insufficient data to try and prove its point that a new arena in the SoDo District will negatively affect the flow of shipping traffic.
Port lacks specifics in arena traffic worries | Local News | The Seattle Times
Instead, the Port has relied on anecdotes and outdated traffic studies, and doesn't have detailed information on which routes freight trucks travel to and from the waterfront. The five limited traffic studies the Port has done since 2007 shed little light on the issues raised by the arena proposal.
The port has cited a study done for street-level traffic from the University of Washington that included a disclaimer: The frequency of data reads was not ideal for analyzing street-level travel patterns on the urbanized road network or for identifying bottlenecks.
Port officials have also been citing a 2003 traffic study that was done to predict traffic patterns in 2015. A follow-up study was never conducted to see how closely the prediction parallelled the reality of the situation today.