For those curious, I’m holding off on endorsing city council district 9 or mayor until one of them moves off of the “be credulous towards Capital Metro’s recent Project Connect hijacking” plan. Laura Morrison is actually the closest in receiving an endorsement under said criteria, by the way. Yes, I’m totally serious. She would need to go a little further, but she’s the only one who moved in the right direction.
I believe we cannot currently trust Capital Metro to serve better land use with better transit (since they still refuse to fix the 2014 error with rapid bus that drastically cut transit service to our city’s most transit-supportive land uses). Building light rail on Guadalamar is a no-brainer and would support existing transit-supportive land uses while easily drawing in tens of thousands of currently marginal non-riders and providing a long-term signal to support incremental improvements to land use in the future. It definitely would have more of an effect on transit sustainability (and hence climate change) than would loosening land use and then having Cap Metro bumble around with horrible stupid unforced errors like rapid bus and Cap Remap.
I believe that the mayor’s craven surrender on CodeNEXT meant we will end up with Laura Morrison’s preferred land use plan anyways, except the mayor ensured that $9M was wasted on consultants. I’d have preferred to spend that $9M on libraries and pools. If we re-elect Mayor Adler and he tries again on CodeNEXT, he has shown that he will not fight hard for whatever it is that he believes in; so we’re pretty much back where we started.
I believe that Cap Metro’s recent shift towards ART in Project Connect is the same sort of dishonest bullshit they pulled on us in 2013-2014; and must not be rewarded with credulous support. Tovo, Skidmore, and Adler are in that bucket right now. Morrison at least has expressed a little skepticism but has not come out strongly against the change of direction yet.
That’s why you haven’t seen any endorsements from me yet (and maybe not at all). But the above should make it clear what it’ll take.
