Who's Afraid of Tim Ceis?
City Council Member Nick Licata made a call to Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis on Tuesday afternoon, May 4, to tell Ceis the bad news: Licata and council president Jan Drago were teaming up to scrap the mayor's monorail proposal, and pass a substitute council version in its place. Ceis freaked. The mayor's office had formally sent its monorail proposal to council earlier that day, with a letter from Mayor Nickels making no mention of revisions--never mind council alternatives.
However, monorail fans like Licata and Drago (as well as City Attorney Tom Carr and SMP board chair Tom Weeks) thought the mayor's version of the monorail transit way agreement--an agreement that specifies construction guidelines for the monorail agency--was loaded with unfair requirements. The ridiculous demands included building an elevated sky bridge from the Elliott/Mercer station to the Queen Anne neighborhood and securing insurance bonds for dismantling the monorail (?!)--a bizarre request that, by the way, Sound Transit was not required to do. Similarly, the monorail was asked to pay for moving Qwest lines, something Sound Transit's agreement demanded of Qwest! Nickels, it seemed, was out to please anti-monorail property owners (and meaty campaign donors) by sabotaging the monorail with untenable demands [Five to Four, Josh Feit, May 6].
Licata's phone call worked. Ceis sent out a new letter, replacing the mayor's, and adding a line: "there may be further refinement to the agreement...." And the mayor's original 37-page public document, which had been momentarily posted on the city's transportation department website, was taken down and taken out of play. (The Stranger got a copy of the document, though, and indeed, it looked like one bad deal for the monorail--see "Critical Conditions," page 12.)
"Tear that up," Ceis now says. There's a new agreement, he explains--informing me that after a Friday, May 7, meeting with Licata, the transit way agreement was changed. No one's saying how it was changed, but Ceis indicated the insurance and bonding requirements were ramped down (savvy Licata is a former insurance agent) and some "minor tweaks" were made to the mitigation demands--perhaps leaving them open to future negotiation.
Until I lay the new agreement side by side with the ixnayed version (not to mention side by side with Sound Transit's 2000 agreement), it's hard to say if Licata scored a victory for the monorail. If the revised version turns out to be dramatically different from Nickels' magnum opus of obstruction, though, Licata and Drago deserve props from monorail supporters. They also deserve a round of drinks from the SMP, whose own negotiators failed to budge Ceis for months. Licata and Drago apparently had something the SMP negotiators didn't--some common ground with Team Nickels. Like the mayor, they're elected officials. I can imagine that a populist like Licata was able to lay it down for Ceis and crew: We were voted in, and we can get voted out. Let's do what the public has asked us to do: Build the monorail.
