Yesterday, Seattle voted on a city initiative, I-83, which attempted to "Recall" Seattle's new monorail project by creating a city law prohibiting any future monorails from being built in the public right of way.
I was against this "Monorail Recall" initiative for a number of reasons. First, it was funded largely by a wealthy downtown property owner who was opposed to the concept of elevated transit in Seattle
[The Stranger]. The Recall campaign used paid signature gatherers (which are illegal in many states) across the city. These people were caught numerous times giving out false information. The title of their initiative changed half way through signature gathering. Furthermore, Seattle has already voted 3 times to build an elevated monorail system through the city. Seattle residents voted to tax themselves (with a large car registration tax) to pay for it; that is how bad the traffic is here. The monorail recall effort boiled down to a handful of rich people trying to undermine the will of Seattle residents' by spending cash.
About 3 weeks before the election, the Recall campaign did a study and found that their anti-transit message was not sitting well with gridlocked Seattle residents. They quickly tried to recast themselves as "Pro Transit". They bought new advertisements implying that, by outlawing monorails in Seattle, the regional light rail project would be more successful. Luckily, Seattle wasn't fooled. Most local papers (with the exception of the low-grade Seattle Weekly) ended up endorsing a No vote on the recall.
The Monorail Recall campaign was extremely well funded, throwing over $800,000 into a city initiative. One of their newspaper advertisement inserts was given the distinction of containing the most errors and deceptions in a campaign peice
[Seattle PI].
Last night I attended the No Recall Go Monorail victory party at the Seattle Glassblowing Studio. I was a little depressed about the close presidential election, but experiencing a political victory for a campaign which I volunteered for was encouraging. I felt like I made a difference.
And it really was a victory party; I-83 failed by a comfortable margin.
.. more to come
