Fulfilling one goal of his state of the city address, Mayor Mike McGinn proposes putting a ballot measure before voters this year to fund the first necessary step of extending light rail to Ballard and West Seattle.

The mayor outlines his time line for funding light rail in a letter sent to the Citizen Transit Advisory Board on Monday. Once the city's Transit Master Plan is completed this summer, Seattle should be ready to move as quickly as possible on light rail planning and design. From the mayor's letter:

This is basic work that must be accomplished before we ask voters to help fund an expanded in-City rail system and before we can begin to seek grant opportunities. The funding required to pay for this planning and design work is not currently appropriated. The choice in front of us is how quickly we move toward planning. To provide a sense of these costs, SDOT estimates that it would cost roughly $10 million to get an 8 mile rail line to 15 percent design.

The city obviously doesn't have an extra $10 million lying around to conceptualize station locations, track alignment, and the in-depth engineering and operational analysis that makes the project close to breaking ground. So to raise the funds, McGinn proposes putting a transit ballot measure before voters in either August or November. "If this ballot measure passed," McGinn states, "the level of design work funded would allow us to seek federal grants for construction, as well as develop a timetable for a larger ballot measure to fund construction."

Ever accommodating, McGinn outlines a few alternatives to his preferred proposal, after the jump.

The first: Avoid the ballot and simply cut SDOT spending by $1.2 to $1.5 million to draft a more limited, conceptual design of light rail. Essentially, $1 million buys pretty, abstract watercolors of what light rail might look like—what street corridors would be used, where stations might go—instead of a blue print that readies the project to break ground. This option would delay planning—and paying for—light rail until 2012, when "a more ambitious transportation ballot measure... including capital funds to construct the next phase of rail expansion" could be introduced.

The second: Do nothing, an option the mayor states "I hope we can all agree is off the table." He continues, "At a time when we continue to face difficult funding cuts, including potential cuts to SDOT's maintenance budget, we also have a responsibility to make the kinds of investments that will build a solid long term foundation for Seattle's future."

It will be interesting to see if the city council shares the mayor's sense of urgency in furthering the conversation on light rail, especially before the TMP is completed. The council's transportation committee recently concluded that the city was moving too fast on making transportation decisions, as is.