Neither Dead nor Alive

As the Seattle Monorail Project is put to voters a fifth time, the Seattle Popular Monorail Authority finds itself weakened by the political and financial miscalculations last week of board members and staff. The board itself—mostly appointed, part time, but comprised of prominent people—is badly divided after months of cultlike resolve. The city's strong mayor, a monorail cheerleader until recently, is actively opposing the project. And public support slipped during a summer of bad news that included cost estimates of $11 billion and then $7 billion, including 50 years of interest, to build a 13.7-mile line from West Seattle to Crown Hill.

The monorail has beaten the odds before, and in a hastily drafted binding ballot measure, the board last week shortened the line, eliminating service to Ballard. But even with a scaled-back proposal on the Nov. 8 ballot, prospects seem dim that Seattle voters will validate the idea again. Will the people finally kill the boondoggle they voted into existence, or will this farce disguised as a transportation project keep coasting?

It was hard to tell last Friday, Sept. 23, when the Seattle City Council and the monorail board, in separate meetings, tried to outsurprise one another with decisive action. The City Council tried to kill it. The monorail board grabbed it back and tossed it to the people who have always saved it before—Seattle voters, who volunteered to pay a 1.4 percent annual motor vehicle excise tax three years ago. So today the monorail is neither alive nor dead.

The short version of recent crazy events has the monorail board failing to put a new proposal on the ballot by a deadline set by Mayor Greg Nickels (Sept. 15); the mayor then saying he'll block permits to build the line and asking the City Council to put an advisory measure on the ballot (Sept. 16); the City Council finally affirming, unanimously, the mayor's plan to block the project (Friday morning, Sept. 23); and the monorail board suddenly seeing the oncoming train and putting the project on the ballot, an hour before the filing deadline that afternoon.

The long version of this tale is steeped with personalities and politics.

Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council exercise no statutory authority over the Seattle Monorail Project, which is an independent municipality established by Seattle voters through the initiative process. But City Hall has long made it clear the project cannot move forward without its regulatory support. City officials in both branches, mostly supportive until this year, began to back away when the monorail announced its long-awaited financing plan—the $11 billion version—in June.

After months of secret talks, the monorail authority had reached a tentative $1.64 billion agreement with the Cascadia Monorail consortium of contractors, led by Fluor Enterprises, to build an elevated transit line from Northwest 85th Street in the Crown Hill neighborhood north of Ballard through downtown and out to Morgan Junction in West Seattle. But there was a big problem. The agency was not generating as much revenue from the motor vehicle excise tax as it had counted on. To pay for the monorail, the staff proposed an unusual financing plan that would have cost $11 billion over 50 years. After public outcry, the monorail executive director, Joel Horn, and the board chair, Tom Weeks, resigned, and the board killed the $11 billion plan.

In the months since, the monorail board and staff, after a hasty leadership change, have struggled to develop a new approach. University of Washington landscape-architecture professor Kristina Hill, a brainy, low-key monorail supporter who has been a board member since 1998, when the organization had a different name and staff, took over as acting board chair. Hill insists that the agency had enough money to pay for the full 13.7-mile project—it was just a matter of making some adjustments to the contract and the financing plan. Hill believed the monorail authority could have come up with a new plan by Thanksgiving that the public and politicians would accept. But as Seattle Monorail Project board member Cindi Laws put it, "Kristina's experience is in the academic world and the design community, not in the rough-and-tumble world of politics."

On Aug. 10, Nickels issued an ultimatum to the monorail board: Come up with a new plan by Sept. 15 and put it before the voters in November. The monorail board did not respond by the mayor's deadline. Some of the monorail board members seemed to believe that the public or the City Council would resist the mayor's intrusion, or that the mayor would change his mind. It was a huge miscalculation. On Sept. 16, Nickels withdrew the city's support of the project. It was a painful decision for him. "This is perhaps the most disappointing day for me since I became mayor four years ago," he said at a press conference. Nickels was an early supporter of the monorail—as far back as five years ago, when most politicians were trying to kill the project. Now he had become convinced it lacked sufficient revenue to continue. He announced that he was terminating the transit way agreement between the city and the monorail, which granted the agency the right to use city streets and rights of way. He renewed his call for the monorail board to put a binding measure on the November ballot. In the event the monorail board again failed to act, Nickels said, he would ask the City Council to put an advisory measure before voters.