4:30 p.m., Tuesday, October 18
Christian Gloddy, a mop-haired, soft-spoken software developer, is sitting at Bauhaus Coffee, laying out his plan to save the monorail from an Election-Day defeat that all but the most optimistic boosters believe is inevitable. In the past two months, Gloddy—an introverted 29-year-old who hates public speaking and has no prior political experience—has formed a new group of young monorail supporters, 2045 Seattle, with an ambitious list of demonstrations planned for the weeks leading up to the election. (The name refers to the fact that 2045's members will still be around to use the monorail in 40 years.) Among Gloddy's ideas: a staged "race" between a car, a biker, a pedestrian, and the downtown monorail; a rush-hour swim across Elliott Bay to demonstrate "what the commute from West Seattle will look like without the viaduct" or the monorail; and a protest at City Hall focusing on "Gridlock Greg" Nickels, who pulled his support for the monorail in September—a change of heart Gloddy says he and other 2045 members found "especially disturbing."
Thursday's protest will be the first official outing for 2045, which has so far confined its political action to three-minute statements during public-comment periods at Seattle Monorail Project meetings. Late on Thursday afternoon, Gloddy says, groups of 2045 volunteers will take up positions at the four corners of City Hall, holding signs and handing out fliers that juxtapose Nickels's own past statements about the monorail (example: "Build the monorail. It's time for city officials to stop thwarting the public will.") against his current opposition. The protest will also serve as a launching pad for 2045's parody website, www.mayorgridlock.com, which skewers the mayor for spending time at meaningless photo ops and ribbon cuttings ("Sometimes there's free cookies!") instead of working to fix the monorail.
The ideas are exciting, specific, and unusual—an appealing combination that seems certain to grab the attention of news programmers looking for a television-friendly image. "We went back and forth about protests," Gloddy says. "You can only say 'rah, rah, rah' for so long. ...If you have a protest and no one pays attention... who did you reach?" With that in mind, Gloddy continues, "we decided each [event] has to have a specific message; this one is the mayor's hypocrisy." The protest is scheduled for 5:00 p.m.—prime time for TV news, and just in time to catch downtown workers leaving their offices.
5:00 p.m., Thursday, October 20As fleece-clad office workers shuffle toward their bus stops and employees at Seattle's sprawling municipal complex turn out their lights, a dozen members of 2045 Seattle gather in front of City Hall—scarcely enough to cover the two exits to the building, much less form visible factions on all four corners. Within an hour, a half-dozen holdouts decide to merge forces at the corner of Fourth Avenue and James Street.
A couple of problems with 2045's Plan B immediately become apparent. The first is that foot traffic, already low at this time of day, is particularly sparse on Fourth Avenue, where the sidewalk faces an intimidating wall of stairs. The second is that the protesters keep attritting. At 6:30 p.m., half an hour ahead of schedule, the three remaining demonstrators start stacking up their signs and get ready to call it a night. "We weren't able to get the kind of numbers we needed," Gloddy acknowledges, shoving fliers somewhat dejectedly into a backpack filled with laser-printed posters and a staple gun.
It is at that exact moment that Peter Sherwin, a longtime monorail supporter and the head of the official monorail campaign, Transit Over Roads, comes bounding down the steps, heckling the young monorail supporters in a manner that is good-natured but not without a touch of schadenfreude. "Where is everybody?" Sherwin bellows. "I thought this was supposed to be a protest!"
THE monorail began as a grassroots movement dedicated to an idea: affordable public mass transit that soars above traffic to move commuters swiftly and reliably through the city. Over the course of four campaigns, the monorail evolved from an idea, to an agency, to a funded, concrete proposal for a 14-mile elevated transit line from Ballard to downtown to West Seattle. The project continued to have its detractors, but they were effectively silenced last November, when monorail proponents beat back a "monorail recall" challenge, funded by downtown property owners, that would have taken away the Seattle Monorail Project's ability to build on city rights-of-way.
But the monorail's fortunes shifted suddenly last June, when the agency released its infamous $11 billion financing plan, which would have required Seattle residents to pay the 1.4 percent motor vehicle excise tax (MVET) for 50 years or longer. Interest costs would have dwarfed the total cost of the project by a ratio of four to one—a figure even most monorail supporters agreed was unacceptable. Plagued by scandal and unable to control a growing public backlash, agency heads Joel Horn and Tom Weeks resigned, leaving a demoralized staff and a largely clueless board to clean up the financial mess they left behind.
In August, the SMP hired an interim executive director, Boston transportation consultant John Haley, to come up with a plan to save the system. But the city's political establishment had already turned against the project. On September 16, Mayor Greg Nickels yanked the city's support for the monorail and canceled the agency's right-of-way agreement—accomplishing with the stroke of a pen what "monorail recall" backers had been unable to do even with a million-dollar campaign war chest. After a week of chaotic board meetings and frantic negotiations, a fifth ballot measure emerged. The proposal would shorten the original 14-mile line to a 10.6-mile segment, saving between $6 billion and $7 billion but eliminating Ballard from the line. If the monorail wins on November 8, the SMP will break ground next year; if it loses, the agency will sell its assets and shut down, and the 12-year-old monorail dream will be finished, likely forever.
Like virtually all progressive coalitions, the modern monorail movement is fractured by an intricate web of fault lines. As opponents of the monorail have closed ranks, its proponents have splintered, divided by such issues as whether the campaign should spend its time dispelling myths about specific aspects of the project, like ridership, or selling generalities, like the need for transit in Seattle.
For the last several years, the largest faction of monorail supporters has been a group that even Grant Cogswell, one of the godfathers of the monorail, derisively calls "technology fetishists"—guys who are really, really into trains. ("You can almost picture your grandfather playing with model trains in the garage," Gloddy jokes.) This group of mostly middle-aged men is represented by organizations like Friends of the Monorail, who argue back and forth by e-mail about such minutiae as station length, column widths, and the monorail's likely MVET growth rate.
Gloddy shudders when he describes his first Friends of the Monorail meeting, at which he says FOM members spent "two hours yelling... about single tracking and maglev [magnetic levitation]. Whenever anybody starts talking about maglev, I want to throw myself off a bridge."
In a recent e-mail, representative of the Byzantine battles that occupy this group of monorail supporters, one member argued for federal standards: "In this instance some kind of backstop/uniform standards of even some basic sort would have been helpful—these 90-foot station configurations are simply laughable."
Such arcane arguments, needless to say, don't do much to win the hearts and minds of the unconverted. That's one reason people like Gloddy, with little or no technical expertise and slim familiarity with—or, indeed, interest in—the details of the monorail proposal, have emerged as the new faces of the monorail campaign. They looked at the monorail's fractured support base and saw an opportunity to get out a message that was positive, simple, and unburdened by technical details. They want the city to build their monorail; they aren't especially interested in how.
"I don't know a lot about the details of the issue," Gloddy acknowledges. "I don't even know what Joel Horn looks like."
At Thursday's protest, 2045 member Molly Taylor, a petite 32-year-old redhead who bears a striking resemblance to the actress Kirsten Dunst, has been given the arguably unpleasant task of flagging down passersby and convincing them to take pro-monorail brochures. Her introductory line—"Please vote yes on the monorail"—is spoken in the deferential tone a waitress might use while offering a glass of water. "We're really trying to get something done instead of sitting around and having meetings and debating the width of each column," Taylor says.
But even Taylor's pleasant demeanor fails to win over many confrontation-averse Seattle commuters, of whom only about half, by Taylor's estimation, have taken her fliers. As we talk, a middle-aged woman pauses briefly to glare at the small group of monorail proponents. "I would never vote for that," she sniffs, before rushing across the street.
This attitude, prevalent among older Seattle voters, frustrates 2045 members like Stephen Bauman, a 19-year-old theater and education student at Seattle Pacific University. "It's not for them. It's for my generation and my children," Bauman says. Like most members of 2045 Seattle, Bauman has no previous political experience and has never taken a particular interest in local issues. What has galvanized him, and other young 2045 supporters, is a frustration with Seattle's inability to build the monorail even after four affirmative votes—a frenzy for process that has kept the city stuck in gridlock for a generation.
They know, from the experience of America Coming Together and other grassroots groups that tried unsuccessfully to mobilize the youth vote in 2004, that they have their work cut out for them. "We have five or six weeks. There's no time to sell anything," Gloddy says. "It has to come down to sound bites and get-out-the-vote with our base. Unfortunately, that's also the hardest group to get involved in politics."
Whether 2045's idealistic enthusiasm for the monorail will translate into votes seems, even by the most optimistic standards, uncertain: In a recent poll, 59 percent of likely voters said they would oppose the monorail in November, and only 32 percent said they would support it. A year ago, going into the November 2004 "monorail recall" election, those numbers were almost exactly reversed.
But as much as 2045's strategy seems like a long shot, it may be the monorail's only chance. Even as young activists like Bauman have mobilized, many of those who worked on the previous four monorail campaigns are burning out. "I've worked on this 11 years and I'm really tired of it," Cogswell told me by phone from Astoria, Oregon, where he will be shooting a film until after the election. "If Seattle can't get its shit together it can go to hell. I mean, really, the city is going to go to hell if we build highways instead of transit." Cindi Laws, a 46-year-old SMP board member who worked on the monorail campaigns in 1997, 2000, and 2002, says she and other longtime monorail supporters are "exhausted, and why shouldn't we be? We had [63] percent support last year and here we are again. The core group that's usually around just isn't there this time." Laws says she is "too tired emotionally and physically to go out and do much campaigning" this year. "If 2045 can do a better job simplifying the message, let them do it. I wouldn't care right now if it was the Republican Party, as long as they got it done."
And monorail board chairwoman Kristina Hill says the 2045 activists' political-outsider status gives them the freedom to "do bold stuff like picking on the mayor directly" instead of "kissing his ass."
One campaign veteran, however, remains skeptical about 2045's ability to incite young Seattleites to vote—Peter Sherwin, a monorail supporter so indefatigable he canceled long-standing travel plans (a three-week trip to Germany) at the last minute, claiming a cold, to run the official monorail campaign. He says he hopes Gloddy is "incredibly successful" at getting young people to vote. His tone, however, is dubious. "Getting out the young people to vote has never worked," he says. "I'm happy to have [Gloddy] prove me wrong, but [getting out the vote] is the hardest work in politics." Sherwin says he would "try to put a little more content" in the 2045 message if he were Gloddy, and notes that changing people's minds—the goal of Thursday's underwhelming City Hall protest—is a lot harder than turning out the traditional pro-monorail base on Election Day.
8:00 p.m., Saturday, October 22After a quick drink at a nearby bar, Taylor and Gloddy converge on the Seattle Glassblowing Studio, where Mayor Nickels is holding a fundraiser for his reelection campaign in the shadow of the downtown monorail. They have a few pointed questions for the mayor. Among them: Why, if the monorail's problems were serious enough for Nickels to publicly pull his support for the project, hasn't he attended a single SMP meeting? Why has he shut down his public e-mail address, greg.nickels@seattle.gov? And if he didn't think it was appropriate to get involved in the business of another government agency, why did he impose an artificial deadline on the monorail?
Nickels was initially responsive to the pair, even posing for a photograph. But after two or three rounds of tough questions, Gloddy says, a staffer rescued the mayor from the interrogation and "we thanked him for his time."
Many of those who have fought hardest for the agency, like board chairwoman Hill, are starting to feel discouraged. "Any time the mayor gets on his bully pulpit and trashes a project, it's hard to recover," Hill says. "I don't know if we can recover." Even Gloddy, two months into his first-ever campaign, says he has had moments of "feeling totally depressed... I had been telling myself that it was all going to be 50-50, and if I could push a little in one direction, maybe it would win." He pauses briefly, choosing his words carefully. "I have more moments now of just general fear. And then I try not to think about it, because there's too much stuff to do."
barnett@thestranger.com
