The tide is turning. It looks like the board isn’t going to let the Mayor rush them into any decisions and the City Council isn’t going to bow to the mayors wishes and put something on the ballot in November. Director John Haley has done some great work for us and it’s good to see he’ll be getting the time to continue.

Check out these primary election results

Pro-Monorail Dick Falkenbury 23.96%
Pro- Monorail Cleve Stockmeyer 33.93%
Anti-Monorail Jim Nobles 41.15%

Totals for Board Position 8
57.89% for the monorail
41.15% against the monorail

Pro-Monorail Stan Lippmann 19.24%
Pro-Monorail Cindi Laws 31.26%
Anti-Monorail Beth Goldberg 46.74%
Write-Ins primarily for Peter Sherwin 2.77%

Totals for Board Position 9
53.27% for the monorail
46.74% against the monorail

Only the top two candidates go on to the final election, so that means this November it’s Cleve vs. Jim and Cindi vs. Beth. Just add up our two pro-monorail candidates and it’s looking good. Keep in mind that a larger group of people vote in the general election, so we have to keep getting the word and the vote out.

The Board Decides on a More Democratic Membership

Cleve Stockmeyer has been fighting for this for a long time and it validates our endorsement of him. Last night, the board agreed that the majority of the board should be democratically elected. Right now, two of the nine board members are elected while the rest are appointed. It will be increased from two to five. Well done.

Some Healthy Press Coverage

The Stranger has some great articles this week and the Seattle P-I has run a few great editorials in support of a well researched path instead of Mayor Gridlock’s hatchet job.

Our message is working it’s way into the press, including this quote:

“Now that gas costs $3, now that our bay is polluted, now that asthma rates are up and traffic stuck in gridlock, the need for this project is even greater,”

The Seattle Times even picked up our new name for Mr. Nickels: Mayor Gridlock. Hopefully the Mayor is paying attention as I don’t think it’ll be the last he hears of his new nickname. It’s kinda catchy, especially for a guy who ended up with a sad 55% of the vote running against a bunch of people we’ve never heard of.

Another Meeting Tonight at 5:30

There’s another meeting tonight and fortunately it’s short. Usually these things are just one a week, but this week has been a bit crazy due to the Mayor’s interference. Regardless, stop by if you can if only for the opening comments. Tonight they will more than likely declare a path forward and hopefully it will be a good one.

The meeting is at Seattle Monorail Project Community Room at 1913 4th Avenue downtown. Some of us will be there as early as 5.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 10:32 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.