Will someone please change the destination signs on the monorail to read “purgatory?”

That’s where this train is bound after last week’s Seattle City Council vote gutting Initiative 41—the 1997 ballot issue directing the city to build a 40-mile elevated transit system. If anyone wants to argue our use of the word “gut,” it should be pointed out that the ordinance approved by a 7-1 council vote deletes all but about a page and a half of Initiative 41’s 16 pages. What’s left simply directs staff members of a joint city/county/state/Sound Transit transportation study group to consider the use of monorail technology. As these people’s paychecks come from either the city, the county, the state, or Sound Transit—and the leaders of each hate the monorail concept with a passion—it’s a safe bet that either elevated, rubber-tire transit systems will be found wanting or some staffers will be looking for new jobs.

Beyond that, the city has converted the former Elevated Transportation Company (a city public development authority set up by I-41) into the new, but hardly improved, Elevated Transportation Committee. Beyond allowing the group to keep the initials ETC, the council empowered the new committee merely to look at the results of the staff investigation and comment on them. (“Gosh, these sure are nice results.” “Yes, I like them, too.”)

Council member Nick Licata was the only “no” vote on the proposal as Judy Nicastro, the other promonorail council member, concentrated her efforts on approving a variety of amendments. For example, a majority of seats on the new ETC committee will be reserved for members of the old ETC board (as if anybody understood that last sentence). Another amendment requires that the council must decide which monorail routes are feasible and how they might be funded within a year after getting the final report from the new ETC.

But the city may have a problem convincing citizens who have already spent two years studying the monorail to continue donating their time to this new committee. Tom Carr, an attorney who served as the last chair of the now-defunct ETC board, says he has encouraged his colleagues to participate, but intends to sit out the process himself. “I don’t believe from the way it’s structured it has any chance of succeeding,” he says of the new system.

Irony lovers take note: The council also granted $50,000 in funding for the new ETC. This is significant because it was the votes of council member Richard McIver and Mayor Paul Schell to kill a proposed $50,000 Sound Transit grant that started this whole uproar. So, instead of accepting $50,000 out of somebody else’s budget, city officials instead chose to be lambasted by constituents, mocked by the media, and then pay for the pleasure. Don’t bother checking the mailbox, folks, those genius grants aren’t coming.

Believe it or not, this story has a happy ending. Two days after the first monorail vote, the council’s monorail-haters failed to muster the needed five votes to place an “advisory question” on this September’s ballot. Ironically, although the proposal was originally credited to council members Heidi Wills, Richard Conlin, and Margaret Pageler, only Pageler ended up voting for it.

Credit Wills and Conlin with common sense—the language proposed for the ballot was so slanted that rain would run off it. More of an antimonorail scare tactic than anything else, the ballot language cites an estimate of $40 million to $80 million per mile for monorail construction. That’s a $40 million range—hardly close enough even for government work. Also included were scary estimates of the tax impact on local businesses and homeowners. (In contrast, cost estimates for the 1997 Sound Transit ballot issue were kept low through rosy assumptions of generous federal and state cash transfusions.) “By just emphasizing the potential tax impact to Seattle residents, the Monorail Advisory is designed as a ‘sticker price reality shock’ to jolt dreamy-eyed Monorail Moonies into fiscally responsible tax paying adults,” griped council member Nick Licata in his e-mail newsletter.

Having repealed most of the Monorail Initiative and rewritten the rest of it, the city is probably in legal compliance with what’s left. The next shot to be fired will come from monorail backers, whose proposed Initiative 53 would allocate $6 million for an unbiased feasibility study and reserve the city’s remaining $127 million in non-voter-approved debt for the project.

You don’t say

Office-holders really have to watch their language, as shown by a recent exchange between the staff of council member Judy Nicastro and city ethics regulators.

In vetting a proposed group e-mail message to participants at Nicastro’s recent Renters’ Summit, the council member was advised to drop a section listing the URLs for state and King County Web sites and a notation that e-mail addresses for individual legislators could be found there. Carol Van Noy, executive director of the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission, says state law is specific that local officials cannot ask citizens to lobby—and that the reference to e-mail addresses implied that readers were being encouraged to write their legislators.

A good point, perhaps, although Nicastro marveled at one line that Van Noy urged be given the heave-ho: “Only the state Legislature has the authority to repeal a state law.” That’s not lobbying, she grumbles, it’s merely a fact about government. Maybe next time she should just advise her readers to take a civics class.