Even as election nears, monorail bid still secret

By Mike Lindblom
Seattle Times staff reporter

Julie Spector, King County Superior Court judge

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Any chance Seattle voters will get to peek at a detailed monorail proposal by Election Day is just about gone.

King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector said yesterday the 1,000-page bid by the Cascadia Monorail Co. to build the 14-mile Green Line is sure to contain proprietary trade secrets, so there's no way she can decide what to release before next Tuesday's vote on whether to scuttle the project.

Spector said she would read a 20-page "Executive Summary" last night and decide which portions of it should be disclosed.

The sponsors of Initiative 83, the anti-monorail campaign, sued two weeks ago for release of the bid proposal by Cascadia and hundreds of related Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) records.

Cascadia, offering trains by the Japanese-based Hitachi Corp., has submitted the only bid to build and operate the voter-approved Green Line from Ballard to West Seattle for $1.3 billion or more. The final design remains a mystery, subject to closed-door negotiations with Cascadia.

I-83 attorney Bruce Babbitt accused SMP of hiding the bid for political gain. Other initiative backers argued that if the bid were favorable, monorail officials would be trumpeting the contents.

"What the voters need to know is what it's going to look like, how many people it's going to carry, and what it's going to cost," Babbitt said.

The anti-monorail initiative itself is slowing the contract talks, SMP chief attorney Ross MacFarlane said afterward. Because of political uncertainty, Cascadia is reluctant to "update the proposal, in terms of doing technical work," he said.

Pro-monorail campaigner Peter Sherwin called the suit a ploy to "leverage the press" by generating news headlines.

Spector offered to appoint an engineer to help her decide which parts of the bid are trade secrets.
 
Before a contract is signed, state law requires SMP to hold at least one public hearing. Cascadia, a 29-member team, says it already has spent $10 million in Seattle. Executives worry about divulging their intellectual property to two other firms that build mass-transit monorails: Monorail Malaysia and Bombardier of Canada.

Hitachi and Monorail Malaysia compete in the fast-growing Asian transit market. In Seattle, a Bombardier group might consider submitting a bid if SMP talks with Cascadia were to break down, Tom Stone, the Canadian team's bid director, said yesterday. Stone said that in his experience, other cities required bidders to write a summary that gives the public some nontechnical descriptions of the design. He said he was surprised that the SMP hadn't done so in Seattle.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com