As the Bellevue City Council heads in to a meeting with the Sound Transit Board, a few thoughts for their consideration:

The selection of light rail alignment into and through Bellevue will have 100-year-plus impacts. Although the final choices will be made by the Sound Transit Board, the council’s decisions will have a role in the process.

Those decisions can either be made by politicians surrendering to NIMBY

cries from one small community (Surrey Downs) and from downtown property moguls worried about adverse impacts on auto traffic, or by statesman looking ahead to what best serves Bellevue, the Eastside and the region for a century to come.

These are not decisions to be based on fulfilling campaign promises – if indeed any were made. Nor are they decisions to be made on “pay-back” for political wrongs, real or perceived, in the past. Nor should they be based on perceived or actual promises about earlier support for a Metro tunnel in Seattle in return for a subsequent downtown tunnel in Bellevue.

Those horse-trades, if made, were long ago under different circumstances by different politicians. Narrow minded, short-term, politically motivated decisions seldom serve the long-term interests.

Instead, the council’s recommendations should rest on what best facilitates the highest ridership from one end of the region to the other (eventually Everett to Olympia), what will have the least long term environmental impacts and what is financially affordable.

The council should show us that when push comes to shove, they can be statesmen.

Richard U. Chapin, Bellevue