Residents of the Avalon neighborhood--a pocket of homes and businesses that line Southwest Alaska Street along the proposed monorail route through West Seattle--claim the monorail agency changed its alignment, adding two right-hand turns to a route that used to be a straight shot down Fauntleroy Way Southwest, to please "a single business owner who does not want the monorail" in front of his property, according to a letter from Avalon Community Association member Suzanne Krom.
The property owner at the center of the controversy is Steve Huling, who operates a veritable car-dealership empire at the corner of Fauntleroy and Alaska. The SMP's old alignment, he says, "would have just about put us out of business," by knocking out parking and blocking access to his property. "If you've got food on the other side of the fence but you can't get to it, I guess you starve, right?"
The new alignment will add 10 seconds and between $1 million and $5 million to the monorail route, at a time when monorail tax revenues are coming in nearly a third short of projections. The agency's own "alignment principles," meanwhile, say that the monorail should run as much as possible along straight lines, with "gradual, not sharp" curves, to cut costs and provide a smoother ride.
SMP spokesperson Paul Bergman says the Huling dealerships simply represent "one voice of many in that area." The agency's West Seattle representative, Josh Stepherson, says agency staff weighed the cost of adding right-hand turns against the effect that taking out at least one lane of traffic would have had on what is already "the busiest arterial in West Seattle."
But others take a more cynical view, noting that Huling, along with other business owners in the area, hired lobbyist Bob Gillespie to oppose the SMP's preferred route after it was released in February. Nine months later, the SMP's recommendation included the change Huling and Gillespie had been pushing for. Gillespie, who is not required to register as a lobbyist, would not say how much he had been paid for his services.
