I spent much of the past week running around from City Hall to the Seattle Monorail Project headquarters and back again, watching the monorail’s spectacular collapse. To recap:

• Two weeks ago, the mayor cancelled the monorail’s right-of-way agreement and called for an up-or-down advisory vote on the project, unless the SMP put its own measure on the ballot.

• After a series of increasingly chaotic (and ever more tedious) meetings, the SMP decided last Thursday to do nothing, instead adopting a resolution giving agency staff more time to come up with a new finance plan, find more money, and cut costs. The resolution also instructed the SMP board to “engage the City of Seattle, including the Mayor and the City Council, in constructive dialogue.” (Too bad they didn’t think of that, say, a week ago.) The risky resolution left open the possibility of a future ballot measure, and didn’t say whether that ballot measure would be binding.

• The SMP's bet proved disastrous for the agency on Friday, when the City Council voted to support the mayor's decision to pull the right-of-way agreement. (They also encouraged the state legislature to kill the project.) Until Friday, six members of the council - a majority - had been prepared to support a February ballot measure if the agency acknowledged it didn't have enough money to build the project and pledged to put a binding measure on the ballot.
Nick Licata, one of three stalwart monorail supporters on the council , lambasted the agency for "putting a bullet through its temple" moments before the unanimous decision. Opponents, meanwhile, were jubilant; after the meeting, Henry Aronson, an activist with the anti-monorail group OnTrack, hugged Richard Conlin staffer Sara Nelson while another OnTrack leader, Krista Camenzind, threw her arms around resolution author Richard McIver.

• An hour after the council vote, the monorail board met again, this time to come up with a measure to put on the November ballot. As reported below, the resolution would cut the initial line from 14 miles to 10.6, ending in Interbay. Even if the measure passes, it's far from clear what its impact would be: The monorail still has no city support, and the consortium of companies that was supposed to build the system says it may cut its losses and pull out of the project if the agency doesn't win some political support.

• Outstanding questions include whether board chair Kristina Hill will resign (at Friday's meeting, Hill's fellow board member, Steve Williamson, made a dramatic and unusual public call for her to do just that); what will become of the agency's two elected incumbents (both of whom polled under 40 percent in last Tuesday's election); and whether the monorail-cutting ballot measure will gain political support, from the voters or the pro-monorail activists who've rallied around the project before. Monorail stalwart Peter Sherwin, a mainstay of the four previous monorail campaigns, will be out of town for most of October.