A handful of us went down to the Seattle Monorail Project’s board meeting and made our debut. You can view our opening speech as a group online and I think it’ll give those of you who have newly signed up a sense of where we are going and what our mission is.

Scan ahead to 31:11 to see both myself and Ellen Hutchinson.

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Here’s the text of the speech for those who’d rather read it.

There’s been a lot of confusion and dismay in the last few weeks about the Seattle Monorail Project. It’s been discussed in office hallways, in email and in coffeehouses all over the city and we’ve all been wrestling with the same question: What do we do next?

I would like to introduce a new group that we hope will be the answer to that question. We call ourselves 2045 Seattle. There are many of us here, myself included, and we can be found at 2045seattle.org

We believe that younger voices are underrepresented in the current debate regarding the Seattle monorail project, but as a group we will be responsible for most of the costs as well as the fact that we will have to answer to the next generation.

We also believe that in January, if construction has not begun, the state legislature will destroy the people’s dream so that they can use the motor vehicle tax for their own purposes. As such, we support the current monorail contract on the table and propose additional avenues of funding in order to finance it responsibly.

Although re-bidding the project is a tempting option to explore, the process could drag on for some time, may not lead to lower costs and may never be completed due to the legislature destroying our dreams and our trust.

The current contract should not be allowed to expire in December. It must be approved by the city council and construction should begin. We offer two proposals we hope the board will pursue to better finance the project.

I was recently surprised to discover that the US government still offers war bonds under the name ?��patriot bonds?��. If the US treasury can offer bonds to buy guns and bombs, then Seattle can offer monorail bonds that pay for clean and healthy communities. Offer us bonds at good rates that preserve our hard-earned savings and we’ll waive the first three years of interest as our investment in our city.
Savings bonds used to be a traditional baby gift to invest in a child’s future. Perhaps once again we can bring back this tradition. We can buy monorail bonds to invest not only in a child’s future, but in a child’s future community as well.

Our second proposal comes from Seattle’s past. Twenty years ago, Pike Place Market needed help. Financially, it was in trouble. I?��m sure there were private interests at the time that demanded it be shut down.

Instead, the leaders at the time confronted this problem. They decided they would try selling bricks and tiles to anyone who wanted to show their support. I’m sure they were nervous and were unsure if it would work, but in the end they sold 46,500 bricks and tiles in just a few years and an incredible feature of our city was preserved.

2045 Seattle is asking the board to create a program so that communities can invest in their own stations brick by brick and feature by feature.

With these two proposals, I’m asking you to find the solution in the people who started it all. Give us a way to invest in the project, to invest in our community and to tell the state legislature: hands off our monorail.

In the long term, 2045 Seattle seeks to break Seattle’s reputation of politely standing still, of not dealing with our problems head on, transit or otherwise, while the rest of the world builds around us.

The new Seattle Public Library, which only took one public vote, gave us a taste of a new future, an inspiring future for Seattle and, quite frankly, we want much much more.

More importantly, we’re willing to work for it and fight for it, because we know we have to build something the future of this city will be proud of.

2045 Seattle asks anyone who believes in investing in the future to join us. We will no longer stand by while nothing is done. We will find solutions to our problems. We will write to our city council. We will certainly vote this November and We Will Build Our Monorail.

Thank you

Most were only able to stay for a opening comments (about 30 minutes) which is perfect. Come in, show your support, and then head out. We’ll make sure a couple of us stick around for the whole thing each time so we know what’s going on, but it’s the comment period where we get our say, show our support and we should continue to take it.

Another short clip worth watching is at 2:28:00. You’ll get to see Team Monorail (the first to speak in the clip) get slammed by Cascadia Monorail (the company offering us the current contract) on a past project Team Monorail messed up: The Bay Area Bridge in San Francisco.

Why a Rebid is the Wrong Idea

• It will cause a delay of 10-26 months (no, i’m not joking) meaning the monorail will not be running in time for the viaduct to come down.
• Time equals money. The longer we wait, the more expensive the whole project gets. Construction costs go up about 4% every year.
• The only way the price comes down in a rebid is if we drop taxpayer protection, which could be much worse in the long term.

Hopefully, the board will vote no on a rebid.

It was a good night, a good start and I hope to see more of you there next Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 11:36 am and is filed under Monorail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.