Press Talk: Don’t pucker up, Pollard; Madore will miss deadline

Look, these two guys don’t like each other, and getting a meeting with them took me months. Still, somehow it happened. So we sat down in my office and discussed a number of issues. Don’t believe me? Hey, it’s on tape!

As the meeting concluded, I asked Madore what he saw five years down the road when it came to major transportation projects. This was his answer:

“Five years from now, we’ll be standing there at the east county bridge saying, ‘And they said we couldn’t build it.’ No kidding. And it’s toll free.”

What the …

Now, before I go any further, it should be noted that the idea of an east county bridge isn’t crazy. At some point, our county will need one.

At some point!

I repeat that because timing is everything. Making the east county bridge a priority simply becomes a distraction to getting the important stuff done. And a replacement bridge for the Interstate 5 corridor is the important stuff.

Now, I might have let this Madore silly talk slide (well, maybe not) if Madore had simply told this pie-in-the-sky stuff to me and Leavitt. But then he went and repeated it a few weeks later in his State of the County address. Not only did he repeat it, he actually racheted up the rhetoric.

“It’s in the works,” he said.

Huh?

I’m not exactly sure how Madore defines “in the works,” but I looked it up. The definition of “in the works” is … “in the works.”

Now, two years after he infamously said all of this, no permits have been issued, no governments have agreed to it, no funding has been put in place, no dirt has been shoveled. Nada.

Oh, my!

And I’m not the only one skeptical of his prediction. Shortly after Madore made his announcement, former Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard couldn’t resist piling on at a county council meeting.

“If you build a bridge in five years, six years or seven years, I will kiss your butt in downtown Vancouver on Main Street during daytime.”

Madore isn’t saying much about his guarantee — at least to me — but I did run into him about a year ago and asked him.

“Are you sticking to your timeline on the east county bridge?”

Madore has this way-cool ability to look at you without really seeing you. And that’s what happened to me. Still, he felt like he owed me an answer.

“Talking to you would be like giving matches to an arsonist.”

Ah, OK.

• • •

I knew back when he first uttered the five-year timeline ,it would be big. So I created a countdown clock to keep track of the Madore bridge prediction. And, as noted, it clicked over last month. Another year under our belt, although some things have changed. Because he’s in the minority now on the county council, Madore’s influence has been reduced to little more than an afterthought. But he did manage to find a positive out of that.

“One of the advantages of the new majority that has taken over Clark County is the new freedom I have to focus on doing what the citizens directed us to do … focusing on the toll-free east county bridge.” Heck, he added, he’s even willing to throw in another bridge, too.

So if all of his focus in the last two years (which produced nothing) wasn’t enough, he’s got even more focus in store for us now. We’ll see how that works out for ya.

But, Mayor Pollard, if you’ll allow me to give you some advice:

Don’t pucker up just yet.