So opined one city hall insider after diving into Mayor Greg Nickels' 759-page, $679 million 2005 budget--a budget that manages to cut $25 million while scarcely shaving the edges off politically popular human-service programs. He even funded Nick Licata's $2.3 million downtown homeless shelter and hygiene center. (The Bookmobile, however, is history.) How did Nickels do it? By raising fees (including a shocking new $5 charge to visit the unimpressive, tiny, and formerly free Volunteer Park Conservatory) and by cutting administrative staff, a sleight of hand that enabled him to limit human-service cuts to a politically tenable $318,000.
But despite the cuts, city council staffers (who are focusing on the budget, to the exclusion of almost everything else, for the next eight weeks) still managed to laser in on some election-year fat: things like $86,000 for a new PR specialist for the Department of Planning and Development, who will, according to the budget, "provide information and outreach services for major planning projects such as the Center City Strategy and Northgate." Both of which, the dryly worded budget fails to mention, are pet projects for Mayor Nickels.
Cash may be constricted at city hall, but it's flowing freely at the Monorail Recall campaign, which just got a $70,000 transfusion from downtown developers Ken Aldaheff (a developer who, oddly enough, also gave $650 to monorail board member Cindi Laws' 2003 campaign) and Chicago-based Equity Office Properties, the nation's second-largest real estate company, who donated $10,000 and $60,000, respectively, toward the effort to kill the monorail. (Second Avenue developer Howard Anderson and the Seneca Real Estate Group piled on $20,000 more.) The generous drops bring the anti-monorail group's total war chest (and I do mean war) to nearly $400,000, dwarfing the $116,000 the pro-monorail camp has scraped together. (Among the pro-monorail donations are an unusual number of $5, $10, and $25 contributions, supplemented by a $20,000 check from Second Avenue Partners investor Michael Slade. Second Avenue Partners, incidentally, is a tenant of Monorail Recall funder Martin Selig, who has donated more than $273,000 to the anti-monorail effort.)
At least some of the money trickling into the pro-monorail campaign (whose name is still, much as I shudder to say it, "No Recall--Go Monorail") was reportedly spent on a poll whose outcome I cannot report here, because no one--not monorail board members, not Seattle Monorail Project director Joel Horn, and certainly not monorail campaign president Cindi Laws--would utter a peep about it. Their reticence, while it doesn't necessarily spell doom for the monorail, is hardly reassuring--the polls, you'll recall, were overwhelmingly positive at this point in the last monorail campaign, and that initiative squeaked past with margin of only 868 votes. Let's hope the monorail campaign spends it wisely--and by "wisely" I don't mean on yard signs that say, tongue-twistingly, "No Recall--No on I-83--No More Delay."
