[State Democratic Party Chair Dwight Pelz responds to yesterday's post where I gave former Republican King County Council Member and former Sound Transit Board Member Rob McKenna (now Washington state Attorney General) props for watchdogging the light rail project back in the late '90s and 2000. Take it away Dwight Pelz ...]
The Latest Lie
by Josh Feit
Josh, this is a near criminal piece of journalism on your part. You have taken the concept of "contrarian", morphed it with "apologist", to arrive at "deluded revisionist".
Yes, Josh, man did walk on the moon, and there was a Holocaust, and Elvis is still dead. By your reasoning we should thank George Bush, for without him we never would have known what a bad idea it would be to invade Iraq. Thanks to Lee Harvery Oswald, LBJ got Medicare through Congress.
Rob McKenna did not just criticize light rail, he agressively, actively, and consistently tried to kill it. – before and after the arrival of Joni Earl. He frequently flew to DC to get his ideological and partisan pals in Congress (Rep. Istook) and the FTA to kill the project. He backed nearly every bill in Olympia designed to cripple the agency, and every measure to build more roads instead of transit. McKenna was never a watchdog, just another self-promoting politician serving his pro-sprawl patrons.
You are empathetic with McKenna because at the same time (2000 – 2005) you were agressively, actively, consistently, and irrationally criticizing the agency, while asking tough questions about the Monorail, like, "What color will the seats be?" Josh was a Sound Transit watch dog and a Monorail lap dog.
You were outraged in 2002 when Ron Sims did not re-appoint your anti-transit ally Rob McKenna to the Sound Transit Board. Sims was clear, it was one thing to have a critic on the board, another to re-appoint an active enemy of the agency. That is when the Attorney General’s intensified his quest to kill both light rail and Sound Transit. You were dismayed because your ally on the inside now had to join you in the fight from the outside.
You write, " But had the crisis in 2000 gone undetected", claiming that only Rob McKenna was pointing out that light rail was over budget and behind schedule. The fact is that by this time a dozen reporters, armed with the 1996 Sound Move plans were writing about the agency’s failures. It was the easiest story in town to write, and reporters were delighted to get the assignment.
I think you should give a similar shout out to about a dozen other anti-transit stalwarts who consisently tried to kill light rail. Why choose Rob McKenna over Maggi Fimia, Nick Licata, Kemper Freeman, Jim Horn, John Niles, Emory Bundy, and Josh Feit? Why not also give them credit for Saturday’s ribbon-cutting?
Where’s the love?
Dwight Pelz
former Sound Transit Board Member
Nice to hear an intelligent voice on this. Josh’s take on transit is tiring. McKenna is an ass clown, Josh is his little toy monkey on this issue.
What’s up with his bad punctuation? Is it too much to ask that a leading state Dem be able to write cogently?
For someone who worked on Mass Transit Now Josh you really have no idea what you are talking about. Kudos to Dwight
“Leading state Dem?” Really? He couldn’t beat Dick McGiver head-to-head for a city council seat. State Democrats are flourishing right now but who deserves the credit? Obama? Chopp? Bush? Pelz?
Anyway… Josh, how about a little truthcheck on McKenna’s role? Obviously Pelz wants to take as much wind out of McKenna’s sails as possible. A moderate (how moderate is he really) Republican could be a real threat to become governor in 2012.
I agree – Pelz has the right of this one. As for “Picky Writer” while I agree that Dwight’s punctuation is appalling I’d rather have Democratic leadership who can make an intelligent argument than, oh, say Bush or Palin’s attempts at policy discourse.
Go Dwight!
Josh & Publicola..
Thanks for printing Mr. Pelz letter, I am a long time Monorail supporter and I agree with Mr. Pelz that McKenna is a self serving hack. McKenna is an enemy of mass transit, not a watchdog. We lost the Monorail, thank all the hard working people we didn’t lose Light Rail.
There is no thanks to Rob McKenna.
Did he really end his letter, “where’s the love?”
Anyway, I have yet to see a Sound Transit proponent admit that there was ever a problem with the fact that it went over-budget, was mis-managed, that it did not follow through on its promises, and was not held to the same standards as the monorail (ie was not submitted for a re-vote). Also it goes near but does not stop at Southcenter, which is just bizarre.
Pelz may be right about McKenna’s criticism not being constructive. But I wish he, or someone, would admit that ST deserved criticism.
The light rail line that just opened is NOT what was originally promised. When it was first revealed that ST was not going to meet its promises, people (including Josh) had good reason to ask a lot of critical questions. Just as we shouldn’t elevate McKenna beyond what he deserves, Pelz shouldn’t be so self-congratulatory that he describes all critics of light rail as opponents.
I only wish we had had people on the board watching the fiasco called WPPSS or more affectionately, WHOOPS. That was a program that ran out of control in the 70s and early 80s and ended up bilking investors a paltry billion or so.
That group tried to be Project Managers which resulted in cost overruns when the mismanaged projects had problems. All contractors falling over themselves? Whew, it was worse than the early days of Sound Transit.
I still can’t figure out why Snohomish County residents are participating.
Now that it is here, we’ll just wait and see, but Josh had a good point- McKenna running around screaming about costs was healthy. Dwight, maybe a little more please? Or, how about county and city candidates, too, please?
I HEART you DP!
Rob McKenna was intent on stopping Sound Transit (and I noted that in my original post.) However, had legitimate criticisms of Sound Transit that others were trying to sweep under the rug.
McKenna deserves credit for digging into complex numbers, providing direct summaries to the public, and for pushing a story that Sound Transit staff and board wanted buried.
(Nickels was not free of ulterior motives himself. He was outing the suspect numbers with an eye on embarrassing Paul Schell, his soon-to-be rival for Mayor. And, in fact, he backed away from the story when it started to snowball.)
Some of the other people that Dwight Pelz lumped in with McKenna (Kemper Freeman, Jim Horn, John Niles) did not provide an insider’s view of the project, nor as impressive and compelling a critique.
Lots of people deserved shout outs on Friday. And lots of people got them. McKenna did not, and I think it was an omission.
Enough already, Josh. The revision in the “people who deserved a shout out” meme you’ve created here by pumping McKenna is shocking. The issues at the agency at the end of the 1990′s were no mystery. The major problems were obvious enough to even the average joe news consumer (behind schedule and over budget) that the same twits who still opposed Link as recently as the the ST2 vote last year recited them as “facts” for opposing ST2. Even though, they were no longer true, even if the Central Link we now have is “not the one we voted for.” Attributing his acts of, er, divulgence (whatever) to the value of making ST a better agency is artifice. He opposed the project and fought it from the inside. The issues the agency faced at the time were little more than convenient ammunition.
And at Trevor’s points–I agree with the complaint about the colloquialism in Pelz’s note. But that’s where it ends. Southcenter? Really? How about because Central Link was always going to go the Airport and it was never going to go to Southcenter? If anything it should have gone through Tukwila proper and served actual neighborhoods in and around parts of the Duwamish and International Blvd areas. But the City fought that alignment during the NEPA process, raising a variety of issues that will now be shown to have been artificial in how the system operates in the Rainier Valley.
Sorry, I meant “revisionism” in the second sentence above.
nice Dwight!
Dwight nails it.
Josh seems to be consistently a subscriber to the “great man” theory of history. McKenna was not a savior. Plenty of people noticed things were wrong at ST back then and McKenna was just one voice. McKenna opposed rail from the day he got on the board, his goal was to kill it, not make it better. Josh wanted to kill it as well and so he has always had a thing for that cute boyish, oh so smart Rob McKenna. But your credit is certainly overblown.
McKenna was one of the most conservative King County Councilmembers ever. He will be running for governor in three years. He will oppose transit, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, and more.
westside, it a whole new world out there. No one knows where the Obama experiment will take us- better or worse, no one knows.
What I am saying is that who knows what the issue will be in three years.
We need clear thinking leaders and we don’t seem to be getting them from either side of the aisle due to how we treat the electeds and how the money people select them.
Josh’ comment made me sit back and think. Good job, Josh. I never seem to get those insights much anymore.
What's up with his bad punctuation? Is it too much to ask that a leading state Dem be able to write cogently?