Monorail board demonstrates its inability to guide project

Kristina Hill, the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) interim board chairwoman, recently claimed that the problems facing the monorail were caused by voter-imposed constraints. This claim is deceptive, and conveniently absolves her and three other current SMP board members of their role in developing, promoting and selling the flawed monorail plan.

In 2000, voters granted the Elevated Transportation Company (ETC) $6 million to plan a citywide monorail system for Seattle. The ETC board, under the direction of chairman Tom Weeks, vice chairwoman Hill and technical director Joel Horn, developed, shaped and adopted the Green Line plan, which is now the subject of widespread controversy.

The plan, released to the public on Aug. 5, 2002, was accompanied by a "Dear Friends" letter, signed by Weeks, Hill, Cindi Laws, Jeanne Kohl-Welles and other members of the ETC board. It read in part (emphasis added):

"... Our work has undergone extensive public review and comment as well as rigorous technical analysis from independent experts. The plan has been refined and strengthened over the months and we are confident that it not only proposes a viable and efficient transit system, but also includes a budget that is adequate to the task of completing the Green Line and making preparations for future monorail lines... .

"Two years ago, through Initiative 53, you asked for a new Seattle monorail. Today, in response, we present this ETC Seattle Popular Monorail Plan for your consideration."

In sum, recently departed SMP and ETC chairman Weeks, SMP and ETC vice chairwoman Hill, and SMP and ETC board members Laws and Kohl-Welles were fully responsible for the development of the Green Line plan — a plan they approved and actively sold to the public. In addition, current SMP board member Cleve Stockmeyer played a key role in the development and promotion of the plan.

This core group of monorail insiders invented and promoted the $1.5 billion debt limitation and the promise of a 14-mile all-or-nothing line as innovative features that had been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

To now redefine these heavily sold features as voter-mandated constraints imposed on the SMP board and staff is disingenuous and does a disservice to the public. This is the plan the ETC board spent $6 million to develop and this is the plan the current board has spent approximately $180 million attempting to implement.

The current board has demonstrated that it is incapable of providing effective oversight of the monorail agency and that it is incompetent to build the Green Line.

This board learned two years ago that tax revenues were 30 percent less than projected and took no reasonable steps to address the problem. This board knew last fall that the contract was at least $200 million over budget and hid this vital information from the public.

This board refuses to acknowledge that it simply does not have enough money to build the Green Line — a Seattle Times analysis shows that the SMP would have to almost double the current tax to pay for the project with a conventional and prudent finance plan ("No painless solution to monorail crisis," July 5).

Faced with a clear financial crisis and growing public outrage, the best this board could do was to announce at its July 6 meeting that it was "slowing down," "retracing its steps" and "challenging assumptions."

At this stage of the game, far too little and far too late.

The only credible and honorable option now available to the SMP board is to stop spending taxpayer money immediately (at our last count it had 25 people earning over $100,000 per year); conserve the remaining SMP assets (land, planning and analysis); and contract with a trusted and credible agency with large-scale transportation and public-finance capabilities to determine how much of the monorail dream can be salvaged and implemented as part of a rational, regional, integrated public-transportation system.