Friday's P-I -- "Monorail financing plan killed"
The Seattle Monorail Project board killed the system's controversial financing plan tonight, sending the project back to the drawing board to try to save the West Seattle-to-Crown Hill line.Screw that. Call your legislators and ask them to take advantage of this opportunity to dissolve the agency.An ad-hoc committee of the monorail board will try to determine how to salvage the project. Exactly what they would do is unclear, but officials said everything is on the table, including trying to come up with a new way to finance the monorail.
The monorail was always a creature of WA's ill-conceived initiative process. Our representative government -- the primary system in most of the USA -- opposed the monorail for years and never would have started it. Having the public vote on indidividual issues leads to silly policy ... the best example of which is Tim Eyman.
Posted by: Bruce on July 1, 2005 01:37 AMBetter buy a good pair of walking shoes! Maybe you can plan a trip to Vegas if you REALLY need to ride a monorail.
Posted by: Larry on July 1, 2005 07:26 AMQuite a few audience members (at the wonderful Majestic Bay Theatre in Ballard) were chuckling at the appropriateness of the plot playing out in front of the Seattle audience.
Posted by: Regret on July 1, 2005 08:06 AMDo you all Remember the last of Eyman’s successful $30 car tab initiatives? One of its purposes was to get rid of the extra taxes being heaped onto car tabs, even after the implementation of I-695 as amended by the Senate all those years back.
The bitching and moaning by democrats that it would kill those taxes, thus eliminating “local control” as a factor… ahhh…. The hypocrisy of it all.
Well, the fine folks in Seattle have FOUR TIMES voted for the monorail. You know, kinda like the people of this state voting down gas tax increases… or voting in I-601… you know… voice of the people?
Anyway, Sen. Ken Jacobsen (D-what else? Seattle) now wants to call a special session of the Legislature to kill the monorail altogether.
Who cares what the voters have said… over and over and over and over again? Let’s call a special session and do what democrats have increasingly whined about the most, when to take such an action will do what they quite allegedly enjoy the least… ignoring the voters of this state and getting rid of local control.
This is not a state issue; the legislature has no business getting involved. If those so opposed to the will of the people when that will doesn't happen to suit them don't like it, they can feel free to make their arguments to the people actually effected, who actually voted this thing into place, to get them to change their minds where it counts, at the ballot box. Take the high road, instead of this underhanded coat-holding whining of getting the state legislature to superimpose their will over that of the people who voted this in.
What monumental arrogance and hypocrisy.
Would they approve of a shorter line at over 9 times the original cost and twice the time to pay it off?
We blew up the Kingdome before we had payed for it. Taxes are still being collected to pay for it.
At the rate the monorail project is going, the same thing could very well be happening, saddling our children and grandchildren with ever increasing governmental debt.
It doesn't seem to me that the voters are getting what they voted for.
Posted by: SouthernRoots on July 1, 2005 09:48 AMYou "say that damn near 100% of the time it is nothing more than flat out lying, deceipt and fraud designed to get the public to vote to authorize" whatever the new glitzy People's Palace of the year is going to be. And you'd like to pull the professional licenses of the engineers (the lofty unelected Planners aren't burdened with such things), or run some similar blame festival, as punishment for unrealistic initial cost estimates.
Nice eruption, but wrong targets. These municipal wet dreams are generally promoted by megalomanic politicians or private business with Influence (the Monorail is an exception, but there are plenty of megalomaniacs from the top of that organization on down). All three stadiums, Kingdome included, fit this pattern, as does Sound Transit in spades.
So an organization is formed, and sets up a budget for the preliminary design and cost estimates. Of course the initial cost estimate is unreal - all there is to work from are the grandiose concepts of my lords Planners, very few of which have any experience in real world construction. But there's also a schedule with a deadline for the designers to meet, and they meet it, having thrown together some preliminary 'plans' (Sound Transit's 'plans' didn't even know what the final routing was to be). In the trade they're called cartoons.
And the cost estimates produced from these 'plans' are mere ballpark figures, no matter how highflown the rhetoric of the project organizers. They should be presented to the public with 50% or even 100% contingency cushions to adjust to the real world of unions, and environmental 'mitigation', demands for baksheesh from countless competing government agencies, and unknown subsurface conditions - but said megalomaniacs might take it personally if the public voted 'no' right up front, so the contingencies get politically bullied to a minimum. The project is a go, and the real design process begins.
And after a couple of years, the contractors look at the real plans and specifications, and their bids finally reveal reality. Sound Transit used a concealed process without public bidding to attempt bullying its contractor into conforming with the lowball initial estimate, but even that scummy tactic failed - hence the reduced bait-and-switch light rail we're not allowed to vote on, for fear it too would be abolished.
If there's any lying or fraud actually occurring in these epic hope-trumps-experience projects, it's the concept that a single thin line of rail transit will serve the public better than a road system that allows drivers individual decisions on their hourly routing and scheduling.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on July 1, 2005 10:31 AMWe are (almost) completely over it thanks.
Posted by: Amused by liberals on July 3, 2005 10:17 AM