On February 18, 2000, Mayor Paul Schell attempted to kill the Elevated Transportation Company (ETC), the public development agency created when Seattle voters approved the monorail in 1997. "The vision of a more extensive monorail system... appeared shattered yesterday as key political support vanished," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote at the time. "Sound Transit's executive committee voted 6-3 to reject a $50,000 request to help the voter-approved monorail project.... Leading the vote were Seattle Mayor Paul Schell and City Councilman Richard McIver."
Last week, on April 4, a smiling Schell handed a seven-figure check to Peter Sherwin. Sherwin is the activist who filed a second monorail initiative last year after the city council disbanded the ETC, effectively repealing the original monorail initiative, I-41. Sherwin's new initiative, I-53--approved by an even wider margin than the original--ordered the city to hand $6 million to the ETC so the agency can come up with a monorail plan to be put to the voters.
In the wake of I-53, Seattle's furiously anti-monorail political establishment seems to have had a change of heart. Before I-53 passed, the ETC couldn't get its phone calls returned, and city council members refused to meet with the group. "Now everything we ask for, they give us," says Tom Carr, an ETC board member. "When we needed to work out a way to handle the money, they had the city's director of finance sit down with me. In the past, we were always dealing with lower-level people."
Seven-figure checks aren't the only thing that changed hands recently. In addition to the $6 million, the ETC got some new establishment-type leadership. Former City Council Member Tom Weeks is the new chair, and former Thurston County planner Harold Robertson is the new executive director.
"It's pretty tough to get around town now," says Robertson, who recently moved back to Seattle after several years in Olympia. "It took me 40 minutes to get downtown from Queen Anne today. We're going to have to find a way to get people around the city more easily. That's what appeals to me about the monorail idea."
While establishment faces are moving up at the ETC, it's activists like Sherwin and outgoing ETC executive director Patrick Kylen who deserve the credit for the monorail revival. But Sherwin also thinks Paul Schell deserves some of the credit. "It was the denial of that $50,000 grant that led to all of the following events," Sherwin says. "If they hadn't blocked that money or repealed I-41, we wouldn't be where we are today."
Weeks gets it. "The voters have spoken not once but twice," he said last week. "Elected officials are paying attention now."
