Last week, I chastised Mayor Nickels for taking a dishonest and politically motivated position on the monorail. The column was titled “Nickels Wimps Out.” Given what happened in the following 72 hours, I believe my cynicism about Nickels was borne out. The monorail board did exactly what Nickels said he wanted them to—they proposed an abbreviated line. Yet Nickels wound up saying he still didn’t support the monorail. The mayor’s dubious reasoning? “Too little, too late.”
Conventional wisdom is that Nickels called the Seattle Monorail Project’s bluff, and the SMP blinked. I’d say the opposite is true. The SMP called the mayor’s bluff, unmasking Nickels’s real position.
Either way, a 10.6-mile monorail line—from West Seattle’s Alaska Junction to Interbay—will go before voters in November. Given the recent run of lame-o news, its chances of passing seem iffy. Regardless of how steamed I am at Nickels’s politicking, though, The Stranger shares part of the blame for the monorail crisis.
As a monorail zealot, I had an extra responsibility to watchdog the SMP. After all, establishment media like KING 5, the Seattle Times, and Seattle Weekly had a longstanding knee-jerk animosity toward the grassroots project, and so their habit of unfairly turning almost any bit of news into a negative headline (the stations were too expensive, the stations were too stripped down) had a Boy Who Cried Wolf effect. That left reporters like me to monitor the SMP. Unfortunately, I erred in the opposite direction.
While I can defensively point to a number of critical Stranger articles (I broke the news about Wall Street’s skepticism regarding SMP bonds back in 2003; my colleague Erica C. Barnett broke the story that the line was going to open two years late; we blasted the agency for the crippling revenue miscalculation; and we were the first paper to call for Joel Horn’s head and for a revote on a new finance plan to save the line), my regular impulse to tear up the naysayers and defend the project at all costs dwarfed those moments. The Stranger’s recurring pro-monorail features defined our coverage.
If Nickels wimped out last week, I wimped out long before that. Had a monorail fan like me hammered away at the revenue shortfall, perhaps the agency would have gotten its act together.
One memory nags me. In April 2004, I interviewed SMP finance director Jonathan Buchter about the revenue shortfall. The Stranger was working on yet another monorail feature to bust the critics. Buchter put on a show at his dry-erase board mapping out the agency’s “creative financing” scheme in colored markers. Perhaps I wanted to believe him and so his math seemed to make sense. However, back at my office, I couldn’t replicate his calculations. That should have been my first clue.
The following April—with the SMP locked down in contract negotiations—the embarrassing phrase “creative financing” was bugging me, and I decided it was time to follow that clue. As a monorail supporter, I was in a unique position to stop the train from going off the rails. Unfortunately, for me, accusations of “too little too late” would be deserved.
