Eating their own

Monorail board approves ballot measure.

The City Council today, in supporting (Mayor) Nickel's denial of street-use permits for the project, expressed frustration and anger at SMP's handling of the situation...

The reporter's emphasis is not on the plan itself but on the blowback which the politicos fear,  mistakenly in my view.

One thing that interests me -- and the media has ignored it entirely -- is that the hostility evinced by the Mayor and Council to the Seattle Monorail Board is hostility to their own appointees i.e the Mayor and Council appoint 4 of 9 members (I think that is the number) of the Board and the former chair and the Mayor were best friends. It's fascinating that they Mayor and Council so easily abandon their own people and take no responsibility for the problems which beset the SMP -- and no one in the media even notices.

There is a story there. Will the Seattle media pick it up? I doubt it as most of it is too busy pushing its own agenda to have the time to inform.

Comments

[Gomez]

I think the Mayor is pissed that after two years and tons of funding, the best SMP, mostly his appointees, could come up with was a 7 to 11 billion dollar line that only served five out of the dozens of Puget Sound neighborhoods.

I wouldn't support that either, and I don't. For 7 billion dollars you'd better cover half of King County, or if you're gonna build a Green Line serving Magnolia to West Seattle, it had better cost far less than 7 billion dollars, like less than half that at least.

[David Sucher]

Then why doesn't he help out rather than trying to kill it? You act as though it's appropriate that there should be some sort hostile competition between different govet agencies.

Rather than compalining the Mayor should be helping.

[bfree2think]

I believe you are correct, to a certain extent. One of the problems with the monorail has always been that it was more of a campaign than an agency. The SMP spin team was always ready to respond when any issue or concern was brought up. After the bid was accepted, the public waited ten long months with no visualizations, no information, no progress report. The media in this town are certainly complicit. They seem to only cover issues when they develop problems.

The council was cowed by the supposed four votes on the monorail into a quick process to examine it. The SMP even fought the logical suggestion that there be a financial review of any plan. The four votes are a joke--the first was a taxicab drivers dream without any money attached to it--I voted for it. The second vote was largely a protest against the city council for not giving a modest $500,000 for planning--I voted for it. The third vote, the only real vote, authorized the MVET and SMP--I voted no. I respect those who believe in the cause, but I have my own concerns about the streetscape, and whether in-city elevated transit is this region's highest priority UNLESS that transit is accompanied by plans for more density around station areas. I also didn't have confidence in the plan or the pitchmen. The fourth vote was a misguided attempt to do an end run to kill the project. Despite my lack of approval for the monorail--I voted not to recall the monorail. I simply do not believe that we should revote on projects that we have already approved halfway through--UNLESS that was promised because of changes in the plan. This vote stunk as a public policy plan.

The SMP erred fatally at the beginning due to their own arrogance. They hired Joel Horn, a man with no executive or transportation experience to run the agency. They installed chief cheerleader, Tom Weeks, to chair the board. They spent tons of money on promotion and staged public process. They spent very little on building the expertise as an agency to conduct the process of building a monorail. They made outragous promises--handing out free passes to the first day of operations, Dec 20, 2009.

The SMP truly believed that they had magically solved the mystery of why people struggle to create new businesses or governmental efforts. They were to be the first public agency in history that wouldn't struggle to form a cohesive group quickly. It was always, don't worry, be happy. Lets Monorail!

But when it came time to review the bid and develop a plan, the SMP was unable to pull it off. Facing a 30% decline in revenues and increased costs, they took ten months to reveal an agreement. You had an agency without enough experienced professionals to negotiate a tough deal with Cascadia. And you had a board that fundamentally failed to exercise the appropriate degree of control over the project. You can blame the poor conception of the board in part. Certainly the electeds were more responsive and active in their concerns.

They came up with a stinker of a deal. It is abundantly clear that they used none of the commonly accepted peer review best practices that an agency entrusted with billions of dollars should. It seems they didn't even do any focus groups on the plan before they sprung it. Were they so insular that it never occurred to them that in getting from point A to point B that they had lost sight of the goal--affordable, quick, reliable, good design transit. Instead we got small station platforms limiting train size with East German design, single track at several points requiring large switch platforms and limiting capacity, and a finance plan that defied all logic. Imagine buying a $400,000 house that cost you $2.7 million by the time you paid the mortgage. But, hey, you own the house.

So--where do we go from here? We are to vote in November on a shortened line which doesn't serve relatively dense Ballard and cuts the line on the West Seattle end. The SMP board admitted today that they had no idea of the specifics of the plan they will place before voters. The cuts in the line save about $200 million in construction costs. The MVET problem remains.

I think they will have a tough time. They will be subject to intense scrutiny with a lame duck wounded interim board chair and finance chair, a temporary chief executive, and little experience or time in which to pull it together. Most people will likely say, "nice idea, but really, I have had quite enough, give up already"

But the silver lining is that the city may take more seriously mass transit needs in Seattle and look creatively for solutions. If monorail is truly a good idea and a workable technology, a way will emerge to reconstitute the concept. This is frustrating when people want mass transit now, but such is life. In the African country of Burundi, the population in public schools doubled with 250,000 new students because the new president abolished the $4.50 annual charge for schooling. Somehow, I think we will muddle on.

[David Sucher]

So the harshness with which the City Council & Mayor are treating the monorail board is precisely because they appointed it? And they knew that they are in fact responsible but are trying to avoid being seen as responsible? As in "We are shocked. Just shocked."

And similarly for the media which has done such a poor job of reporting it?

That makes a lot of sense. Well it's too bad they have to CYA at th expense of the citizens of Seattle.

But a question remains: why are you so angry, bfree2think?

[Gomez]

Nickels appointed several members to the SMP with the idea that they would put in the work needed to make the monorail work. That he would have to give a helping hand to a committee that he appointed to focus on the sole task of making the monorail work after giving them three years and over $750 million to do so can be considered a tad ridiculous.

[bfree2think]

Not angry at all, David. I think most people find me to have a sunny disposition. Disappointed and worried, yes. This city and region face enormous challenges. One of the biggest is building a mass transit system. I do not think the failure of the SMP will help in building public confidence.

If the SMP staff and board showed any sign of learning from past mistakes, I think the public might give them more time. But they don't appear to be on that track.

As for the mayor and council, I agree with Gomez. They have many jobs to do in this city. You have to put the best people on a board you can find and trust them to do their job. There are many models of transportation agencies they could have learned from. It appears they did precious little of this.

The mayor and council are giving SMP tough love simply because it appears that nothing else will work. They clearly told the SMP what they must do after the bid blew up. The board failed to take it seriously and came up with no new plan--only a consultant report that suggested that maybe you could shave 10 years and a few billion dollars off the financing costs. And this is with the most generous assumptions on MVET growth.

Let me pose a question to you, why didn't you complain about the lack of focus in the media and city government on monorail planning until the manure hit the fan? Shouldn't you have been concerned too?

[David Sucher]

Moi? It's not my job, for god's sake.
I hope you, b2, don't mind if I suggest that that is an awfully odd question.
You think I have some special duty to report on the Media & the Monorail? That's a yuck.