Chuck Taylor
Resigned Executive Director Joel Horn: still a believer.
Details
MOSSBACK: Built or killed, the monorail will be with us forever. By Knute Berger MORE
Related Content
More About
It came with a sigh, a shrug, and, ultimately, the resignations of the top two officials. The Seattle Monorail Project's embarrassingly awful $11.4 billion financing plan is dead. The agency's board came to that conclusion on Thursday, June 30, and four days later Executive Director Joel Horn and board Chair Tom Weeks took the brunt of the hit by quitting. The monorail itself is likely going to need a Heimlich maneuver, performed by the voting public, to survive. After three years of devising a way to pay for the proposed $2.1 billion starter Green Line from Crown Hill to West Seattle, it took only a few minutes for board members to say that the money plan stunk—and that they had no idea where to go from there. "Everything's on the table now," Weeks said optimistically before he quit—a sentiment echoed by others throughout three hours of board spitballing.
Except everything already had been on the table, hadn't it? SMP officials had insisted only days prior that floating limitless loans with $9 billion in interest over 50-plus years was their best available financing plan. They have only five and a half months before construction partner Cascadia Monorail can pick up and walk away. How could a proposal surface with the same crippling legal and financial constraints, including a 30 percent revenue shortfall, that would be an improvement? More number jiggling? More corner cutting? SMP has already stripped down the originally envisioned system, leaving fewer rail miles, fewer stations, shorter trains, and longer waits for riders. Any more carving and it will be a bus on a bridge.
Three consecutive evenings of public hearings on the Cascadia Monorail bid agreement—and the now-dead financing plan—got under way Tuesday, July 5. Would a solution emerge, perhaps suggested by someone who lives far from the monorail Kool-Aid pitcher?
At a packed Ballard High School gym Tuesday night, the mostly older crowd supported—gauging by applause—a monorail for Seattle but loathed the plan for this one. Some preferred buses, many liked light rail, and everyone dreaded the noise of potential monorail construction down 15th Avenue Northwest in Ballard. Still, resident Don Ware told the audience it's Seattle's irritating habit to always say no to civic innovation without ever knowing why: "You guys haven't had an answer in the 62 years I've been alive, because the people of Seattle always have a reason to say no."
But several other speakers ticked off the reasons this monorail plan is folly: huge columns in the streets, fewer stations with smaller platforms, two-car trains not much bigger than a large bus, monster overhead switching platforms, the need for a car (to get to the station, where there will be little parking, and to pay for the monorail—whose revenue is based on a car licensing tax), and, in the words of an elderly woman shaking her finger at the SMP board seated on stage, the "secrecy and the arrogance" of monorail officials when dealing with neighborhoods. And one more thing, said slow-drawling Larry Porter of Ballard: In that last vote, which would have recalled the monorail, a yes vote meant no, and a no vote meant yes. "Now what kind of shenanigans is that?"
At the board meeting last week, critics lined up to say "we told you so," and one, Geof Logan, asked almost everyone in the room to resign. He and others told the suddenly expendable Horn, sitting within lunging distance across the table, that he should be fired. Horn had no comment then, but after a few days of twisting in the wind, he and Weeks, the mad scientists of the monorail "experiment," as it was called, threw themselves from the train.
In a joint communiqué appropriately issued on Independence Day, Horn and Weeks implied that they had become heavy baggage that was weighing down progress. "On Friday [July 1], when I left the SMP office," Horn wrote, "I wasn't planning to resign. But after talking with my wife and family and reflecting on the magnitude of the issues we face today, I knew stepping down was the right thing to do." He allowed that "my continued presence as executive director is proving to be a distraction from the real issue at hand—the importance of building mass transit in our city." He and Weeks took "full responsibility for the current situ-ation and feel that it is in the best interest of the project to step down," convinced nonetheless that "a monorail for the city of Seattle is within reach."
At a press conference the next day, acting board Chair Kristina Hill, who says SMP design and construction chief Tom Horkan has become interim executive director, worried about "voter fatigue" if a new monorail plan should suddenly be put on the upcoming September primary election ballot, as some supporters are suggesting. She said that scrapping the existing bid and "starting from scratch would be a mistake." Hill's still hopeful the current plan can be modified and saved, which monorail critic Henry Aronson says is another example of a board that is "drunk in the wheelhouse."
