he's an icon to some and a pain to others and now he's the author of a tell all book dick falcon barry rise above it all right here tonight on public exposure i'm stan ever dick welcome back it's so much fun always to have you on the show me so what's it like to write a book rise above it all with fairly easily because all you do is kind of go back over your memories of what happened with the rise and fall of the seattle monorail project  that was essentially your baby from the beginning i wrote the initiative and then some other people myself got it on the ballot and i think the seattle voters wanted it so much you know it wasn't particularly difficult we actually had almost no campaign the problem was when w tried to actually build the model and we're going to get there but you know that seattle voters wanted it so much and actually the new york times even thought this is really pretty cool because here was their headline their headline in one thousand nine hundred seven was or else gives the adult voters the last laugh yeah timothy egan wrote a nice piece about us when you were talking about was the notion that we were trying to build a transportation system from the ground up rather than from the top down we were telling the leadership what we wanted rather than asking or accepting what they had sent from above by the way for those of you who are watching and tell everybody else as well there's no way we're going to be able to get to everything that's in the book or even close but dick balkan mary will be available june the third at a forum at june third starts at three thirty in the results and i'll speak at six thirty and i'll be around until late again bunch of questions and all but he will be there and we'll be showing that up throughout the show all right so we had the new york times and we put that up but i went hunting around here in the seattle times and local papers for what the seattle times headline was and this is actually the best headline that i could find which is that things are still up in the air for the monorail so here the new york times saying good things about it at seattle times is basically it now the seattle times was a champion of the light rail commuter rail program of sound transit and also i don't think they ever got their their whole mind around the monorail concept how important was it could make a profit it would not have fatalities it would be on time it would actually move people and all of those are in contrast to all other mass transit systems efficient they are profitable and these model rails because they have their own right of way don't get into accidents don't strike people cars other things and because of that they also get there on time but it just wasn't one election it seemed to be multiple elections you know fast forwarding to two thousand and two this is out of actually the stranger because again i went to the seattle times and i really couldn't find a good headline out of that but a lot of real wins and even with this there's a bit of a comic aspect to it yeah one of the problems is that i unfortunately have a desire to to be so we say flippant sometimes so for example one of the stations had to be within four hundred yards of the nose of the monorail of the fremont troll a perfectly legal thing to do but people seem to grasp those kinds of things and run with them on the other hand the stranger even interesting way duff in the first election in allowed us as an authority to build things like multiple state storage stations to partner with private people so that for example out in ballard you would build above the sunset bowl and then the sunset bowl would have forty thousand people that could get to their their facility sunset bowl the bowling alley there at approximately fourteenth the market which has now been replaced by hartman and on as are many other ground level things  power power power it's also changing but yeah well i think i freely admit to being bit to being in favor of the monorail at the time you know for every single election and i wasn't primarily was because of this because i did just a tiny bit of research and monorails around the world even if you americanize the dollars there were still twenty five million to maybe fifty million dollars max a mile but i can win this group got hold of and it exploded why what happened was joe horn came on board first as a board member then as a staff then his executive director in addition tom weeks became the chairman of the board of the monorail project and these two  people really in their hearts wanted to build a monorail but the way they saw to build a transportation project any public works whether it's bright water sewage treatment plant or the viaduct tunnel replacement five twenty you build it as big as you can my joke was is that when joe horn got to a fork in the road and this way it was less expensive than this was more expensive he would build a third way of the most expensive possible solution and he did that over and over and over again both in the capital production and in the operations and even the financial transactions were very expensive they had a weekly in two thousand and six as a headline it says joe horn's blank check and there's a great quote and there's an actually comes from our resident crown hill who had been a monorail proponent she says this but worst of all there was the secrecy and the arrogance of the monorail board and staff in response to the concerns of the neighborhoods or in response to any group that did not fully agree with them is that true partially true the problem was that joe horn actually kept things away from the monorail board for example when the project if you will collapsed of its own weight of its cost the board chairman at the time had not been shown the final pricing document until the last two weeks julie yes she did not see the details of why things cost so much and even many people on the staff were kept ignorant if that wasn't part of their particular project they were not told about that but how hard was a transportation expert then why should he be telling everybody else because he's a public transportation expert you must be transparent and also somebody would have tricked to this idea that he was driving up the cost to build both contractor approval and union and labor in general approval he was going to hire one hundred and fifty seven people for thirteen trains which had no driver that's borderline criminal it's insane well there's more that you talk about with the numbers and you know you're aware we don't want to make people glow with about the numbers about one hundred and fifty seven high paid employees for thirteen trains and no drivers but no one including the janitor under fifty thousand dollars a year yes i think joe horn and a lot of other people would agree with him that the one of the great generators of the middle class in america in the last twenty years has been government employees and so they felt that there was no reason to hire somebody even as a cleaner of the train for less than middle class wages well is that a bad thing the way he did it was bad at first he had way too many cleaners i believe he had about a dozen cleaners secondly out at the airport the port of seattle does not clean the concourse of the airport the concourse is cleaned by the advertisers because they want a clean site for their advertising they pay nothing the government pays nothing to clean the airport you know that you know the airport is cleaned by the advertisers and that's that public private partnership which can work you can also make it a bad situation but in many cases you make it a good situation by letting the private people hire the people to take care of the public problems by the way again if you wanted to  hear more about the book or actually asked dick some questions yourself june the third at town hall he'll be there at five thirty he's going to start speaking at six thirty again june the third two thousand and thirteen at town hall we're going to put up  times throughout you can find out more information