Seattle Press on Line - Give the People What they Want, (Like The Kinks Said)

There From Here

Give the People What they Want, (Like The Kinks Said)

By Tara Peattie

Mar 28, 2002 -- 1962: Governor Al Rossellini gets the World's Fair demonstration span of monorail built and running within 10 months, between Seattle Center and Westlake. He wished at the time that he had at least continued it down to the Airport, and he has remained an impassioned monorail advocate ever since.

1997: Dick Falkenbury and Grant Cogswell run a successful initiative to build a city-wide monorail.

1999: City Council pulls the small amount of funding that was earmarked for monorail planning, killing the project, a motion later declared illegal in court.

2000: Cleveland Stockmeyer and Peter Sherwin put together a more tightly written initiative, and Peter's "Rise Above it All" organization campaigned to "re-elect the monorail." The measure passed with greater support than any mayoral-elect ever in this town.

These monorail victory moments aside, the greatest test yet of monorail popularity will be the November vote to spend lots of money to build the thing. Yes, many claim that money will be the big issue; that people will pull back agasp when they see a pricetag. Supposedly voters are so weary of taxes. But Seattle voters have mostly spurned Tim Eyman's initiatives and have demonstrated time and again a willingness to pay for needed services.

Time may in fact be the larger issue. Time is money. People are weary of paying taxes? How gawdawful weary are we of sitting in traffic? (Personally, I never sit in traffic, but I'm tired of looking at it.) So how will it go over on the ballot if we see that we don't start building monorail until late 2005/early 2006, and monorail won't be ready to ride until 2007 at the earliest? Those are the early, very informal projections from the Elevated Transportation Company, charged with doing the planning for the Seattle Monorail Project.

We are being pulled in two different directions. 1) We are an instant-gratification society. We're known for our consumption and export of fast food burgers, a la McDonalds. Why are we so into burgers? There's a type of burger for everyone, and they're fast. 2) On the other hand, we have lots of process and procedure. The government can't simply steamroll a large project through downtown--we are not Japan or Malaysia.

The ETC is dreaming of McDonalds, of the entire Golden Arches restaurant chain, when what we crave is a few hamburgers to get us started. We need positive feedback along the way so we don't have to worry so much about all that process. The ETC has not decided whether they will build in phases, or build only once the entire 14 miles from West Seattle to Ballard are engineered, in 2005 or 2006. Will we vote for this when we have to wait a minimum of five years to use the new monorail?

Ed Stone, spokesman for the ETC, comments, "We are hell-bent for leather to come up with the cost projections and routing for the whole segment." This is the right course to follow to give voters needed information. But the choice remains whether to engineer and build smaller chunks earlier, and get them up and running. This could mean building first through downtown--from Seattle Center to the stadiums; or West Seattle to downtown; or Ballard to downtown. How soon could we replace the existing monorail and extend to the stadiums?

We've had a terrible couple years, with the Nisqually Quake, the terrorist attacks, the recession, and layoffs. A decision to engineer and build in phases, getting segments up and running sooner, may help the monorail pass the vote in November. History shows there's strong local support for this project. A decision to build sooner will not only bring lots of jobs, if a line is built through downtown first, it will help ease the pain of replacing the Viaduct, and the threatened loss of the downtown bus tunnel if Sound Transit ever builds light rail. It'll also provide a release valve for two huge sources of downtown traffic congestion, the stadiums and Seattle Center. And since capital costs rise as time passes, it may be cheaper to build sooner.

Tara Peattie can be reached at peattie@drizzle.com.

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