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July 18, 2005

"Joel Horn's Blank Check"

I used the plane ride home to get caught up on some of my reading, and, hoo boy, there's a doozy in this week's Seattle Weekly on Joel Horn, the now-former director of the Seattle Monorail Project.

It does, at times, feel like a bit of a smear on Horn (who, unsurprisingly, didn't comment for the piece), but the larger points about the uncertainty surrounding the monorail tie in to my feelings on the subject perfectly. Board members seem oddly in the dark about key points of the proposal:

"I mean, the first time I knew about it [the true cost], I read about it in the paper," says [Board member Sue] Secker [provost of Seattle University]. "Don't you think that's interesting? And I'm the finance chair."

The Weekly does a good job of summing up the core assumptions and promises that are either a) being glossed over or b) simply not true, including:

• Opening day. Originally promised for 2007 (partial) and 2009 (full) - now looking at 2011. Maybe.
• Budget. (We know about that already.)
• Breaking even operationally. I didn't know the SMP had never committed to a projected fare structure - e.g., they were planning to launch a product without knowing what they planned to charge for it. Uh ... Marketing 101, anyone? Hello?

I stand by my earlier post on this - the board needs to go. We need outside experts, with an outside perspective, to give the skinny on this thing. The people who made this mess are not the right ones to clean it up.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 18, 2005 8:28 PM. Posted to Politics.

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