Monoreality

Concerns over how the new Seattle monorail is to be built are giving ground to a nagging new question: Will it be built? Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) officials, who overestimated their revenue projections by a third, still think they have enough money to make a revised plan work through cutbacks and closing a license-plate-tax loophole that could leave scofflaws facing felony perjury charges. The project is moving ahead in an impressive, almost evangelical manner, with the goal of putting the first Seattle cars in the air by the end of 2007. But it will not be the project approved by a slim margin of voters in 2002. Instead, there will be fewer rail miles, longer travel times, more difficult access, and unforeseen engineering challenges, such as a station 10 stories tall and an 84-step commuter stairway up a hillside. The devil in such details is likely to surprise even supporters.

The project will bring an estimated 2,100 construction-related jobs and more than $600 million in new income, claims the Seattle Popular Monorail Authority. But it also could cost the relocation and/or loss of more than 1,000 jobs, 80 businesses, and more than three dozen households. Up to 1,400 parking spaces will be lost, and 137 residential and business properties would be partly or wholly confiscated, while more than 300 other property owners will, in the longer term, endure the trains' noise and vibrations.

NONE OF THIS, of course, was imparted to voters in 2002, because the monorail was mostly a concept. No one back then seemed to imagine that a 5-acre campus for the developmentally disabled would be uprooted, affecting hundreds of clients. The charity, Northwest Center, is already preparing to give way for a massive monorail operations center at Interbay, even though an arguably more suitable industrial site is available in the SoDo neighborhood. Similarly, did anyone know in 2002 that 500 parking spaces would disappear downtown, that trains might pass within five feet of buildings and close enough to residences to offer passengers a sneak peek into private parlors and boudoirs every five minutes? Who knew that—now seeing the mock-ups—bulky guideways and sprawling stations would so darken horizons, dwarf neighborhoods, and, like the station planned outside Seattle Center, loom over the intersection like a floating freeway?

Who figured that in some areas—Delridge, for example, where a projected 70 percent of riders would arrive at the monorail by bus—the plan succeeds only if enough of them can be persuaded to indeed disembark and wait for the monorail, rather than stay on a bus that might beat the train downtown?

MEET THE JETSONS

Those developments and the cash-light monorail project's admission that it doesn't yet know how much it will cost are causing a quiet backlash. It includes a falling-out with original supporters and top civic officials, including former Mayor Norm Rice, and the launch of a community drive for a new vote to approve or reject the evolving plan. Even Dick Falkenbury, the Seattle cab driver who is considered the father of the monorail proposal, says he'd like to see the monorail's private contractors, now formulating their bids to design, build, operate, and maintain the system, toss out the project's planning and be turned loose to come up with their own "revolutionary" ideas. There is, as well, a growing chorus at City Hall dissatisfied with the project's breakneck schedule and financial cutbacks, with some City Council members threatening to simply abort the 14-mile, $1.75 billion project.

Make that the 13.7-mile (they remeasured), $1.6 billion project (they recounted). After its miscalculated revenue from an annual tax on Seattleites' car license plates fell as much as $300 million short—a critical situation the monorail's staff kept secret from its executive board for almost four months—the monorail authority has removed at least 4 miles of guideways from its planned Green Line route from Crown Hill, north of Ballard, to Morgan Junction in West Seattle. Rather than travel each way on separate rails, trains now will switch back and forth from two rails to one and back to two. This alternate rail plan is being sold as more architecturally and construction friendly, but it's a cutback that extends trip time while covering as much as $140 million of the shortfall. Even with a slimmer, $1.6 billion kitty, the monorail project is still shy at least $150 million. Almost half could be made up, says the monorail, if the Legislature passes new laws expanding license-fee collections and allowing the monorail to crack down on scofflaws who evade the tax by using non-Seattle addresses—though passage of such legislation is uncertain this session. The monorail's added car-license tax is currently 0.85 percent and rises to 1.4 percent this summer, continuing until 2020, or 2030—or is it 2040? No one's certain. The owner of a $20,000 car, for example, will contribute an extra $280 a year until the monorail bill is paid.

THE SYSTEM COULD soon get a tax-collection boost through a pending administrative-law change by the state Department of Licensing, which would require car owners to note their primary residences on title forms—or else. The guess is that more than 10,000 evade the tax, perhaps by using a relative's address or a postal box in the suburbs. According to a copy of the DOL's proposed rule, a registrant would have to provide the "true, fixed, and permanent home and place of habitation in Washington. The department will presume that a registered owner's primary residence is the same as the address used in driver's license records and voter registration records." The information must be certified "under penalty of perjury that the information provided is true and correct." Effectively, that extends a penalty that already prevails for falsifying other licensing documents. No one's saying—yet—that the monorail will send out the Address Police. But in the midst of the monorail funding controversy, it seems prison sentences have suddenly been injected into the debate. "Who's advising SMP on legal affairs?" asks monorail critic Geof Logan. "Tony Soprano?"