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Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Sensible track for monorail route
It wasn't done easily, and it was done only by the slimmest of margins, but the Seattle City Council made a sound decision Monday on the monorail route.
Bringing the monorail through the Seattle Center rather than taking an expensive and inefficient gerrymander around it makes perfect sense. In both function and style, a new monorail will complement the Seattle Center as a vibrant, forward-looking facility that is a harbinger of the future, more than a chronicler of the past.
Councilman Peter Steinbrueck's comparison between bringing the monorail through Seattle Center and demolishing the Pike Place Market or pouring a freeway through Washington Park Arboretum was as florid as it was false.
As important as reaching the right decisions is reaching them in a timely fashion. As its schedule is now, the City Council will grant or deny final approval on the monorail route alignment June 14 -- just one day before bids are due from firms that want to tackle the design-build-operate-maintain project. Those bids will depend, of course, on what the project will look like, including the route and design guidelines. Because the DBOM approach puts the onus on the bidders to do the job on time and on budget, uncertainty will inflate the bids.
Council members who oppose the monorail and might be tempted to slow the process and thus drive the project's costs unnecessarily high should know that such mischief undermines the voters and short-changes the taxpayers.
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