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June 30, 2005

Monorail: Change Or Fail

Hoo, boy. Here we go - the papers are consumed today with monorail news and opinion:

• The Stranger: "Back To The Voters"
• Seattle Weekly: "One Billion Per Mile"
• Times: "Staunch allies of monorail warn agency: Change or fail" (Letter sent to the SMP by Licata and Carr, PDF)
• PI: "Pressure on monorail grows"

However, the best piece comes from Josh Feit at The Stranger, writing in his "Counter Intel" column:

"After backing the monorail through four elections, championing the project, and debunking the opposition in article after article, I cannot stand by the current finance plan. My disillusionment increased in recent months as news about Seattle Monorail Project's "creative financing" plan started to leak. As it turns out, the agency was also misleading us into believing the payment plan would live up to voter expectations. But $11 billion in debt service!?"

Like Feit, I've been a big, big booster of the Monorail (but unlike Feit, Joel Horn is unlikely to call me for moral support). And, like Feit, I'm aghast at the financing. The proposal itself I'm actually OK with. But the approach of the SMP leadership - spin and denial - scares me to death. These are the people we're trusting with this project? What else don't we know?

Fortunately, it sounds like the City Council is coming to their senses. Richard Conlin said this morning on KUOW that he is voting against the project. Nick Licata and Tom Carr, staunch supporters both, have sent a "letter of concern" to the SMP board (see link, above). It looks like hard questions will be asked. There may be a way of salvaging all this yet.

Allie took me to task in email yesterday:

"You are making me furious Mr. Suddenly Anti-Monorail!

We KNEW this thing was going to be expensive and we knew we were using a limited fund pool to build it. And while it is RIGHT to have concerns (even very serious concerns) about the Monorail *financing* that doesn't mean the monorail itself is a bad (or undo-able) idea. It's what Seattle needs."

She's totally right. We do need a rail-based transit system in Seattle. And a monorail makes a lot of sense, given our unique geography - subways are expensive (tunneling), standard light rail runs "at grade" (a codeword meaning "in traffic with everyone else") and so going up ("rise above it all", right?) makes a hell of a lot of sense.

However.

The monorail proposal and the monorail financing are two different things. The Stranger really called it when they said, "Hey, we're good with the proposal - we need the Green Line, and we need it built just this way. But we also need to not pay $11 billion for the thing. Let's fix the financing, give Joel Horn the boot, and get going with this thing."

Bingo.

The Green Line is, on its own, an amusement park ride. No, really. It is. It's a point-to-point line that will provide a backbone for future line development. The trick to the "future line development" - be it in 2020 or 2030 or, God forbid, 2078, is having funds available from a willing populace who sees additional lines as a smart investment.

We can be assured, without question, that spending $11Bn on the Green Line will prevent the construction of any future lines. And so we get an amusement park ride.

For what it's worth, it cost $1.4Bn to build Disney's California Adventure. If we're going to get an amusement park ride, let's consider getting a frickin' coaster out of it, huh?

Posted by Gavin Shearer at June 30, 2005 1:02 PM. Posted to Politics | Transit.

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