We’re not sure if it was just part of their usual breathless cheerleading for Mayor Mike McGinn or a simple misreading of the facts, but the Stranger has an inaccurate report on the transit proposal Mayor Mike McGinn made in his State of the City speech yesterday afternoon—namely, that McGinn plans to bring a proposal to the council this summer that would put light rail “all the fuck over the place.”
On Slog yesterday (under the headline, “McGinn Pledges to Deliver Light Rail Package by This Summer, Among Other Things”), Stranger writer Cienna Madrid wrote:
During his State of the City Address delivered in packed council chambers this afternoon, Mayor Mike McGinn pledged to put a plan before the Seattle City Council to expand light rail into neighborhoods like Ballard, West Seattle, and across the 520 Bridge.
Not true. What McGinn did refer to in his speech was the Transit Master Plan update—a long-planned proposal that would serve as a blueprint for capital projects to facilitate transit in Seattle. The master plan could end up recommending any number of high-capacity transit modes, including bus-rapid transit or streetcars; indeed, the plan could come back without any recommendation for light rail—which would require a citywide ballot measure—at all. If McGinn had vowed to bring specific light rail lines to the council yesterday (as Madrid suggested), that would have been a public acknowledgment that he was abandoning the Transit Master Plan process, a process to which he has said he’s committed.
That’d be one hell of a story.
Here’s what McGinn actually said: “When the Transit Master Plan is finished this summer, we’ll know which corridors are the best for high-capacity modes such as rail. And I will send to council a Transit Master Plan for high capacity transit, including the kind of rail that makes sense for our overburdened corridors.”
That is not a pledge to expand light rail into Ballard, West Seattle, and across the 520 Bridge. We get it: McGinn (a rail supporter) may just be going through the motions while privately assuming a recommendation to build rail to Ballard and West Seattle is a foregone conclusion, but that doesn’t mean the Seattle Department of Transportation’s Transit Master Plan that the mayor sends down to council will necessarily recommend McGinn’s preferred option.
The real story, as we noted yesterday, is that McGinn is backing down on his campaign pledge to put a measure on the ballot to build rail to Ballard and West Seattle by this year.
City council members, including McGinn ally Mike O’Brien, have made it clear that they have no intention of putting light rail to Ballard and West Seattle on the ballot this year, when it would have to compete with the Families and Education Levy ($231 million) and a bond measure for the seawall ($241 million), among other potential urgent funding proposals. Moreover, the Transit Master Plan draft won’t come out until the end of August 2011 at the earliest—likely too late to put any of its recommendations to a public vote.
As for light rail to the Eastside, what McGinn referred to in his speech wasn’t a proposal to fund rail on 520, but the need to make the new bridge “light-rail-ready”—something the state department of transportation, along with a majority of the city council, already says it will be. Again, not as sexy as a “light rail package” to “expand light rail… across the 520 bridge”—but it is what McGinn actually said.
