Monorail Board Meeting Downtown Tonight at 5:30
There’s a meeting of the Monorail Board of Directors every Wednesday at 5:30pm including this evening at Seattle Monorail Project Community Room at 1913 4th Avenue downtown. Some of us will be there as early as 5.
Come to the meeting, grab a button, show support for your monorail and then we’ll go grab a drink afterwards. These meetings aren’t for everyone, so even if you drop in just to grab a button, that’s cool too. This one should be pretty active as it looks like the board will make some decisions tonight as to how to move forward. Christian won’t be speaking tonight as he’s waiting to see what move the board makes next.
The Quick Guide to Your Options at Meetings
The meeting starts at 5:30 and we generally try to show up between 5 and 5:30. If you can make it, here are your three choices for what to do:
Option 1: Show up to meet your fellow 2045ers, grab a button, watch the public comment period and then head home.
Cost: About 30 minutes
Option 2: Show up to meet your fellow 2045ers, sign up to speak in the public comment period when you get there and then head home.
Cost: About 30 minutes and some bravery
Option 3: Meeting and speaking, but you stay for the whole thing.
Cost: The time varies depending on the agenda, but this meeting will probably be an hour total.
If you can’t make it, we’ll have short summaries of the meetings up here soon afterwards.
The Meeting Agenda (Simplified)
The regular meeting starts with a public comment period (sign up if you’re up for that), and then will launch into presentations and a vote by the board on whether they should rebid the monorail contract in an attempt to lower costs.
August 17th, 2005 at 7:10 am
If this were a reasonable process, there would be a reasonable period (3-4 weeks) to get public reaction to the proposal (design, technical plan, financing) followed by a decision by the board whether to accept the proposal. I understand that the public meetings held subsequent to the release of the contract proposal were a joke. The SMP was acting like we were still at the point before the vote asking questions like “Should there be bathrooms at the stations?”. Good grief!
If the SMP decided the bid was a “no-go” as it appears to be because of the financing then the bidding would reopen with every effort made to attract new bidders within the constraints of what the people voted for and a new negotiation round would begin. The difference this time would be that the Board would not allow itself to be shut out of the negotiating process. This is an argument for an elected board. One would hope that had the board been more informed and involved they would have shut down the negotiations much sooner and gone back to the drawing board and we would not have wasted these precious months waiting for word.
But then we know this is not a reasonable process.
August 17th, 2005 at 8:03 am
I don’t think the negotiations should have been shut down sooner. What should have been dealt with sooner was the money problem. Revenues were coming in short and had they not, the contract wouldn’t have had the compromises we see today including the quickly trounced financing plan.
That said, we have had many weeks since the proposal was released and I certainly hope everyone has given their feedback either via email or in person. There is at least one meeting a week which includes two comment periods for anyone to address issues that concern them. My hope is that this feedback will be incorporated into what we are voting for this November, something that we will all feel is worth fighting for.
As for electing the board members, I very much agree and it sounds like the board may talk about expanding elected members tonight.
August 18th, 2005 at 2:41 pm
Please, please, please, build our monorail. I agree, we need the monorail now and spent way too much money in the past 10 years getting this to the point. I don’t care how we do it but GET IT DONE now. There is no way Seattle will be able to afford it in the future. Everyone heading north I-5 and everyone using the viaduct now will have massive gridlock if the City does not figure out how to make this monorail happen. I figure paying taxes for this monorail is a way to give back to our communities and make them better for everyone. I can tell you I’ll be mighty mad if the City sells the land purchased at top dollar for the monorail to below market value to developers if the monorail does not get built. This whole thing about stopping the monorail comes from big business who only want to line their pockets further and who will never use the monorail or any type of public transportation. SEATTLE STOP BEING SELFISH and think about everyone. Now is the time to step up to the plate and make this happen!