"I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, North Haverbrook, and it sure put them on the map."
Posted on 11/20/2002 9:48:24 AM PST by Sicvee
JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES Jubilant monorail supporters finally get to enjoy their win. The Nov. 5 vote had been too close to call until yesterday.
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Forty years after Seattle built a futuristic one-mile monorail for the 1962 World's Fair, a tiny majority of voters has approved what could become the first crosstown monorail system in the nation. The proposed 14-mile "Green Line," connecting Ballard, downtown Seattle and West Seattle, led by 868 votes as of yesterday afternoon, an approval rate of 50.23 percent. Only about 20 ballots remained to be counted before official totals are certified this afternoon.
Monorail backers rallied at Westlake Center, southern station for the original monorail. A train pulled into the station, honking. Joel Horn, who is to be confirmed Friday as the first executive director of the new Seattle Popular Monorail Authority, hooted and slapped the sides of the monorail cars as a crowd chanted: "Monorail! Monorail!"
Dick Falkenbury, the cabdriver who founded the monorail movement nearly a decade ago, thundered like a professional wrestler as he addressed the 70 boosters at Westlake.
ELECTION 2002
SUPREME COURT Mary Fairhurst edges Jim Johnson LEGISLATURE New faces, old problems
COMING TOMORROW A final statewide vote tally
MONORAIL The backers: 'We also have to thank the voters of Seattle for putting their trust and hard-earned dollars into our hands to build them a transit system, and we're going to do it.'
— Dick Falkenbury, Founder of monorail movement
The opposition: 'It's not our life to be obstructionists. Our job was to educate the voters.'
— Henry Aronson, Leader of Citizens Against the Monorail
"We also have to thank the voters of Seattle for putting their trust and hard-earned dollars into our hands to build them a transit system, and we're going to do it," he said.
Henry Aronson, leader of Citizens Against the Monorail, said his group has no intention of seeking a recount and will dissolve.
"It's not our life to be obstructionists. Our job was to educate the voters," he said. "The more people learned about the monorail, the less confidence they have in it," he said, referring to the narrow victory.
Mayor Greg Nickels hailed the vote.
"I'm very pleased. To me the monorail is one of the three critical steps for us in building a transportation system that works for the 21st century," he said. He said the other two steps are replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct and building a Sound Transit light-rail line.
Nickels said that next week he will ask the City Council to approve a $20 million loan to jump-start the new monorail authority, cash that the council said last summer it would provide. The city transportation department will be ordered to speed up the permitting.
If the project goes smoothly, portions of the line would open in 2007, reaching the outer neighborhoods by 2009.
Down by 3 votes
When yesterday began, monorail trailed by three votes and had slipped with each batch of new absentee ballots counted since Election Day, Nov. 5. But the last ballots to be tallied were from people who voted at the polls. As it turned out, an intense get-out-the-vote effort by monorail volunteers saved the project.
On Election Night, votes at the polls ran 54 percent pro-monorail. The batch counted yesterday broke 61 percent in favor.
Votes counted yesterday were mainly in-person "special ballots" — including those that got stuck in machines, those from people who showed up at the wrong polling place and those cast by people who didn't get their usual absentee ballots in the mail. The last few hundred came from people who had mailed in absentee ballots but did not sign them.
Bob Roegner, manager of King County Records and Elections, said he thought the 868-vote lead "was a pretty wide margin" to survive a recount. That seems unlikely, since the opposition would need to pay up to $47,000 for a hand recount and only raised $76,214 for its entire campaign.
JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES Dick Falkenbury, founder of Seattle’s monorail movement, speaks to supporters at Westlake Station yesterday. But Falkenbury was not particularly festive. “It’s just a step,” he said of this year’s election, the third vote in favor of a new monorail.
The pro-monorail Rise Above It All campaign collected $491,407 in donations, including large sums from potential contractors.
What lies ahead
The squeaker election marks a new step in Seattle's love affair with monorail.
The 1962 monorail was meant to be a temporary experiment but wound up as a permanent tourist line. Gov. Albert Rosellini, who was in office then, said this year that his greatest regret was not extending the line to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
This generation's monorail movement began in the early 1990s as a dream by Falkenbury. Two citizen initiatives later, the Elevated Transportation Co. (ETC) spent $6 million planning and promoting the Green Line under a proposal published Aug. 5.
The opposition waged an intense effort that included a successful lawsuit to include cost figures in the ballot title. Aronson also used public-records litigation to generate publicity after the ETC released 700,000 documents to him, but withheld nearly 1,100 documents it said were confidential.
Monorail opponents also tried to exploit a failure in the monorail plan to explain that new cars are exempt from a monorail vehicle-excise tax for the first year.
The new monorail authority is looking for what ETC Chairman Tom Weeks calls "a running start." Its first meeting is Friday, and next week the group will start discussing a process to seek public comments about where the second monorail line should go, Weeks said.
Monorail planners want to sell bonds next year while interest rates are low and hope to have construction bids and substantial design work ready by next year.
If construction bids for the Green Line come in under budget, the monorail agency may consider seeking alternate bids that would extend the route to Northgate. However, such a change would require a public vote, Weeks emphasized.
Aronson says he believes the monorail effort will collapse because of neighborhood resistance, or if people evade the tax of $140 annually per $10,000 of vehicle value.
There are several tasks the new monorail authority either will do or needs to do in its first three months:
• Hire new staff and consultants.
Right now, Horn is the only monorail employee. He has a background in land development plus strong support among monorail officials for his energetic work this year, but has no transit experience beyond his ETC work.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, B.C., the team that built the new Millennium SkyTrain line will finish its contract by Dec. 31. John Eastman, the project president, has also overseen construction of a subway line in Hong Kong. Asked about importing SkyTrain talent, Weeks said Canadian experts could be part of a construction team bidding on the project.
Two groups — Canada-based Bombardier plus Granite Construction, and Hitachi plus Washington Group International — helped with monorail planning, contributed to the campaign and would probably bid to build the line.
• Seek technical fixes in Olympia.
One potential problem is that people could evade monorail tax by registering vehicles to out-of-town post boxes. Mayor Nickels and Weeks say they think residents won't do that in sizable numbers, while many respondents to a poll funded by monorail opponents said they would.
Some lawmakers have speculated that the Legislature will be in no mood to help Seattle's monorail, especially after Seattle environmentalists fought Referendum 51, the statewide measure heavily weighted to roads. But regional transportation proposals also call for high car-tab taxes and would be vulnerable to the same problem if lawmakers don't fix it.
Monorail planners would also like an exemption from sales tax on construction costs, saving $80 million. But if they don't get that break, the plan includes that expense.
• Reorganize the monorail board.
Weeks has said that within three months or so, the current board will be changed to include two mayoral nominees and two from the City Council, and five picked by the ETC, whose members have now become the interim monorail authority. By law, the new members must take their seats by the end of 2003. Nickels said last night that he has begun thinking about his choices but has not recruited or interviewed contenders yet.
A rapid transition is important so the board is stable when bonds are sold, and new appointees could also assuage fear that the ETC acts as a private club. By next November, two of the ETC-chosen spots change to publicly elected seats.
• Reach out to neighborhoods.
Monorail officials say they will begin public meetings along the route by early 2003. So far, property owners at four potential station sites — the Zesto's near Ballard High School, Nara Grill on Fifth Avenue, Samis Land Co. at Second Avenue and Pike Street and Full Moon Saloon at Morgan Street in West Seattle — have gone on record as saying they'd like a monorail stop.
Stations in outlying areas could be built on top of retail shops or strip malls in the neighborhoods, Horn says.
City Councilwoman Judy Nicastro endorses re-zoning station areas to take buildings eight stories or higher, to boost ridership. Nickels says transit-related zoning needs to be considered, with neighborhood participation.
Last night after leaving the rally at Westlake, Falkenbury said the monorail effort has kept its energetic, can-do attitude so far. But he seemed weary and not particularly festive.
"It's just a step. Now we've got to start organizing, we've got to find staff," he said. "If this becomes like just another ... public-works project, we're doomed." Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com.
Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company
Phil Hartman (RIP) was that guys voice, right?
He was one of my all-time favorites on SNL.
Like all mass transit this will fail miserably. Sure it will be ok for a while until the novelty wears off. And then the requests for increased subsidy from government will start and soon it will be almost entirely a useless tax burden.
The killer is that people never change and people want to be around people just like them. I think the guy's name was John Rocker who complained about mass transit in NYC that way. He was right then and the sentiment is still right.
I, like most folk I know, would rather drive in the privacy of my own car, safely insulated from the smells and sounds of the strange people in the town I live in. Paying $100 or more a month for parking is infinitly better than paying $50 a month for mass transit.
God Save America (Please)
Hell, its only $1.4Billion; with all the whining you'd think we had better uses for the money.
Ha1! But look at the bright side - its only about $140/year per $10,000 value of your automobiles. Hope you aren't into Benz's or Beemers.
Kudos to Seattle voters. Let the obstructionist luddites squawk. Let the construction begin!You suffer from a lack of pertinent information here my good friend Green. All things being equal, and from the face of it, you're thinking "great, a step forward".
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