Microsoft Bridge Marked to Receive Federal Money

"Money To Burn" by Smohundro.

When we make a mental list of Northwest companies hurting the most for help from government money, Microsoft is nowhere near the top. That's why we were surprised to note that one of the projects earmarked for federal stimulus money (a lot of money, $11 million) is the bridge Redmond and MSFT have been wanting to build for years to connect the two sides of the company's campus. Back in 2006, Microsoft promised to pony up $17.5 million (70 percent) of the bridge's total cost; over the years, the estimated cost has risen, and rather than make the company come up with the extra money to finish the project, officials decided to see if the nation's pockets were deep enough to cover it.

The White House says this particular project is "still up for review," as it should be. Yeah, a bridge from Microsoft to Microsoft might be an important part of their campus rebuild, but surely we can think of other projects more deserving of the federal funds that aren't affiliated with one of the most solvent corporations in the world. The company is now paying a little less than half of the total cost of the bridge. The jobs created by this project won't even last that long, and then we're back to where we started: unemployed construction workers who all want Macs but can't afford them, even after helping to build this very important bridge to ease the lives of software engineers. How will this bridge meaningfully stimulate our economy, again?

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By Katelyn in News on March 16, 2009 11:00 AM

Comments [rss]

horatiocain

If the employees of those companies want a bridge to be built, they should work through the political process. Surely a proportionate number of the area's citizens will benefit.

Or, not.

jdavin

I read that article earlier today and thought it was pretty typical one-sided Microsoft-bashing. If you replaced Microsoft with Google or Apple in that article I bet people would see it differently. Say Mountain View needed to build a bridge to deal with the crushing traffic caused by rapid employee growth at Google, would you say no state or federal funds should go towards the bridge?

Since when are corporations responsible for building roads and paying for city infrastructure? This bridge would be an improvement to the Redmond city transportation infrastructure. There are people other than Microsofties that use those roads as well - for example, Nintendo and a tech college are nearby.

The article said "it’s fair to ask why the company isn’t paying more of the bill", but I actually thought it's fair to ask why the company is paying *any* of the bill at all. It's the government's job to build roads, not corporations. It's also funny that MS is having to run their own bus system because Metro / Sound Transit wasn't good enough.

The article also forgot to mention that Microsoft's new West Campus is opening soon and over 4000 employees will be located there. That'll put additional traffic on the already overloaded 40th street bridge.

That said, even though I work at Microsoft I'm not 100% sympathetic with MS for their situation. By choosing to expand in a suburban area ill-equipped for that number of people they've brought some of the problems on themselves. If they located more offices in downtown Seattle they could expand vertically (high rise office space) rather than expanding horizontally as in Redmond. Also the transportation burden could be more easily handled because cities have more mass transit options that converge on downtown.