The Monorail: An Outsider’s Perspective
Former Seattle Monorail Project employees are feeling vindicated by an article by Alex Marshall in this month’s Governing Magazine, which implicates Mayor Greg Nickels and other Seattle officials in the death of the monorail, arguing that if Nickels hadn’t viewed the voter-created project as an “alien entity” that arose outside the usual, accepted political channels, he could—and would—have worked to save it.
Marshall argues:
From the Big Dig in Boston to your average new cloverleaf, projects almost always have trouble at some point in making the numbers meet. Yet rather than help the monorail project leaders work out a new financing plan, Nickels and others sent a downsized version back for a fifth referendum — again hoping voters would kill it, which they did in the wake of misleading new cost figures.He who lives by referendum, dies by referendum, I guess. But five referendums is at least three too many. Once voters approved a specific design and a financing plan, the city should have done everything it could to make it work.
Marshall is no fan of monorails—he calls them “expensive, ugly and impractical”—and he gets a few things wrong: you can call Dick Falkenbury lot of things, but “hippie cab driver” isn’t one of them, and the monorail was passed by an initiative, not a referendum. But Marshall does make a compelling case that democracy requires leaders to listen to the citizens the first (and second, and third, and fourth) time—not endlessly second-guess their decisions until the vote turns out the way they want.
Amen!
Look—people can have their opinions of monorails (technology, aesthetics, etc), the green line route, the funding mechanisms, etc. and people are certainly justified in being upset with the final proposed financing plan that killed the whole thing. But…there were a LOT of thing we had to do to maintain tepid support from the mayor and some of the city council that added cost to the project and created PR challenges. And a project that had gone through the more traditional channels wouldn’t have faced those problems.
Maybe that’s an argument in favor of the traditional channels. Maybe it’s a testament to the power of the executive in this city (the few times he chooses to use it). But bottom line is, if the mayor had really supported the project…rather than the lip service he gave when it was politically beneficial, it would be under construction right now.
Now it’s time for him (and the city council) to step up and do the job they were elected to do. Show us you have the balls to drive through some meaningful transit projects.