The City Council opened the Oct. 13 meeting with a proclamation honoring participation in the Great Oregon Shake Out. The evening ended with a plea from Councilor Tom Horning to take immediate action to save thousands of lives in a Cascadia Subduction Zone event.

“I’ve always felt that we have a lot of work to do in the city,” Horning said. “Namely, fixing bridges so people can evacuate and get to safety before things hit.”

Horning, a geologist, was elected to the council in 2016 on a platform of fixing the city’s bridges. So far, other priorities have held sway. At the time, he estimated that replacement of the city’s most vulnerable crossings could be completed at a cost of about $50 million and save thousands of lives, he said. The city could start looking at funding mechanisms now, with options including added fees for water bills, road levies or outside funds from state and federal governments.

He reiterated that call four years later, proposing a challenge to the state’s room tax structure to allow cities to use funds for seismic resiliency.

Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes happen about every 500 years, but occur in clusters, Horning said. That cluster is 330 years between earthquakes. It’s been 322 years since the last one.

Even a small tsunami could wash away 85% of Seaside’s homes. A bigger tsunami could destroy 95% of the city’s homes.

During a disaster simulation, a scenario for the coast predicted 300 people would die from earthquake injuries, but 4,500 people would drown from a tsunami. Of those 4,500, 4,000 of them would be in Seaside — with between 16,000 to 18,000 fatalities projected in the summer tourist season.

“This is why it’s so important to get the bridges replaced so they don’t collapse from the shaking, the ground doesn’t liquefy and have the thing dropped like elevators into the rivers,” Horning said. “We need to get these bridges replaced and we need to do it within 20 years.”

According to the League of Oregon Cities, 70% of net revenue from a new or increased room tax must be used to finance tourism promotion or tourism-related facilities or finance debt of tourism-related facilities. No more than 30% may be used for other purposes.

“What we need is 100% of the money that we raise by raising room taxes,” Horning said.

While the rule, established in 2003, has been challenged in the past, Horning said it is time for Seaside and other communities to “test the waters” with a lawsuit, stressing the tourism-related benefits gained by safer bridges.

The lawsuit could cost $50,000 to $100,000, he said, but “if we win we might get $20 million to $50 million for construction,” Horning added. “It seems to me that we can win in a contest where we try to find what was intended by the legislature when they passed this 20 years ago.”