Three tests: monorail, schools and Boeing Field

The real question that came out this past week can be put this way: Is local government competent to handle big problems?

A constant turmoil of events is part of any city worth being called a city, so last week's calamities are not the seminal tests faced by other cities such as Cleveland and New York staring at bankruptcy or Detroit and Los Angeles following their riots. Instead, Seattle and its institutions face the crumbling effect of little tumbles, like those that ruin sand castles. The Seattle Monorail Project is in the mind-bending land of incomprehensible costs. We are also now in the squishy realm of economic benefits: The monorail rationale is keeping a couple of thousand jobs in the city, as if the goal were the project and not the result. I know that I would not be allowed to spend $11 billion on a $2 billion project. Somebody would stop me. That becomes the test of local government's ability to confront big problems well.

As monorail defenders and employees rush to the survival of the dream, the question crops up: Can these guys do this? Do we have enough talent on the bench to do big jobs and do them right? The monorail decision now moves to Seattle City Council, where it must ask if the cost justifies the results.

That was the same question asked by Seattle parents in the recent debacle over school closings.

Angry parents and teachers had reached the same conclusion, guided by the press, that the district was in deficit and needed to cut costs. The test was in how to manage the crisis. But when confronted, the School Board abandoned school closures. In effect, it threw in the towel. The institution said it could not cope with the duality of cutting costs and providing services. In a big test, the board members punted.

In the dust-up over Boeing Field last week, the emerging message is one of local government uncoordinated and at odds over common goals. Some portions of King County government embraced the idea of having Southwest Airlines do its cost-cutting strategy at Boeing Field, while the Port of Seattle was sending out messages of disappointment and dismay that Southwest was walking away from a deal that supported Sea-Tac's third runway.

I didn't hear much about what would be best for the flying public — a cheap Boeing Field-to-Oakland flight sounds pretty inviting to me. Instead, institutions clashed. The argument, and you can bet it was more intense behind closed doors, was that one local government, the county, would gain at the expense of another, the Port.

In these three cases, institutions are confronted with the unexpected and the unpleasant. The informed public is entitled to ask: How well do they perform?

I have long held the theory that there are good-time mayors and bad-time mayors, good-time presidents and those who rise to greatness during bad times. These are not bad times for this city, far from it — we are not in crisis or social disarray. But the public watches this stuff and gets messages, directly and indirectly. I would say in these three cases, local government failed to offer messages of assurance and competency, and of cooperation on behalf of the public's interest.

The bid for Seattle's monorail finally came to light and it was not pretty. City Council members, some in the throes and ecstasy of re-election, suddenly find themselves running not so much on their records as on how they will respond to a real test. Will they punt, will they seek another study and defer their decisions until much later? Will they tell monorail to shut down?

Some council members are already saying they are not going to fall on the tracks and be voted out of office for opposing monorail. If it's about re-election, the public will smell that out immediately.

People who run things in the city and the county tend to see what's before them as silos of concern. That's human nature and the intensity of the office.

I think people who read and vote see different connections, and they ask: Do we have enough guts and brains in office? In three tests of big questions, the answer was no.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com