Mayor Mike McGinn has assured the public that there's no need to conduct an analysis under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) prior to signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the city, county, and potential arena investor Chris Hansen's investment group. The MOU is an agreement between all the parties to fund an NBA (and potentially) NHL arena in the future, using a combination of public and private (Hansen's) money.

Earlier this month, a spokesman for McGinn assured PubliCola that the city would require Hansen's group to pay for any environmental mitigation that turned out to be necessary after SEPA analysis is completed, so signing the MOU before doing environmental analysis is no problem.

However, in a letter vetoing three agreements between the city and the state of Washington to move the deep-bore tunnel forward last year, McGinn made an argument that sounds almost identical to those made by arena opponents like environmental attorney Peter Goldman---that the city shouldn't sign an agreement to build a major project until environmental analysis is complete.

In vetoing the agreements, McGinn wrote:

The State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) exists to show the public the harmful impacts caused by a project, both to inform the decision process as well as to provide an opportunity for leaders to negotiate solutions. Both City and State law are clear: a final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) must be completed before a final decision is made that commits the government to a particular course of action. The EIS on the tunnel project will not be final until fall 2011. To commit to the tunnel alternative before the EIS is complete raises serious questions about whether the City and State are complying with SEPA and certainly is not consistent with the intent of the law.

UPDATE: McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus says the arena agreement is different from the three tunnel agreements because the city council passed the tunnel agreements late in the game---after adopting the deep-bore tunnel as its preferred Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement alternative, although the city still had not begun the SEPA process. In the case of the arena, he says, the city is at the beginning of the process, and still has plenty of time to back out of the MOU if the environmental process uncovers a problem neither the city nor Hansen's group is willing to pay to mitigate.

Second, Pickus notes that the arena MOU makes the arena contingent on completing an environmental analysis and on all parties to the agreement approving any mitigation (and agreeing on who will pay for it). However, Pickus still says Hansen would be responsible for picking up the bill if, say, the environmental analysis concluded massive mitigation was required. That's not explicitly in the agreement, which says only that the city and county won't put in their share of arena funding until "any challenges to the Project have been resolved in a manner reasonably acceptable to the Parties."