There is a critical impasse threatening Bellevue’s new City Council and no one is happier about it than Kemper Freeman, the man who vowed to Sound Transit shortly after its birth in 1996: “Not an inch of rail in Bellevue!”

Joshua Adam Hicks’ article in the Nov. 14 Reporter, “Will new city council change the route of Sound Transit’s East Link?” puts his finger squarely on a pending calamity in describing the new majority on the council that favors a different route through south Bellevue from the one the council, after years of deliberations, has already recommended. That route would bring East Link into south Bellevue along Bellevue Way and 112th and then into a tunnel serving the downtown core.

Hicks writes that new members Kevin Wallace and Jennifer Robertson, along with Conrad Lee and even, disappointingly, Don Davidson favor the abandoned route along the BNSF line. That’s precisely where there are no potential riders.

And yet, at a campaign event I attended before the Nov. 3 election, where all nine candidates for the four available seats appeared, eight of the nine voted in a tally for the downtown tunnel option, Wallace being the sole no vote. If the idea for the BNSF route is to turn left at Main Street, cross over 405 and then enter a tunnel, I have not heard of it. Wallace would skirt the downtown core entirely.

Hicks rightly asks what Sound Transit will think if Bellevue now flip flops on its earlier recommendation. I ask: is this the way the leaders of a “world class city” conduct themselves!?

What clearly looms now is not only the council once again going back to the drawing board on the route into Bellevue but maybe also on a still different tunnel configuration. After painstaking years, the inevitable further delay this will bring is just what Kemper Freeman wants: another chance, which he’ll be sure to seize, to scotch East Link once and for all.

Dean Claussen, Bellevue