Today, it's $4.5 million, as reported by the Seattle P-I and Seattle Times. A year ago, the Seattle Times reported, unquestioningly, the "news" that:

Seattle's existing monorail may need up to $100 million in reconstruction if the proposed monorail from West Seattle to Ballard is scuttled by voters or elected officials... The city has deferred maintenance on the monorail, which carries 2 million riders a year, because the new line was supposed to replace it, Anderson said.

But later in the same story:

Anderson told the City Council it could take $50 million to $100 million to rebuild the old line, based on construction projections for the Green Line.

What a tight estimate! Surely no margin for error there. Yet today that enormous number has shrunk to just $4.5 million. (A quote from a Seattle Center spokesperson that the original $50-$100 million was a number they "just threw out there" has vanished from today's Times story.)

That seems like a hell of a deal, all things considered. So why are we hearing this:

"It's like having a used car. You keep patching it together, patching it together, and you eventually think, you should have a new car," said Councilman Tom Rasmussen... "We need an assessment as to whether it's worth patching together."

Actually, Tom, it's like having a used car, and the mechanic tells you you need to change the oil, and you don't. Then the mechanic tells you you need new brakes, and you don't. How about I just put in some windshield cleaner then? asks the mechanic, at wit's end, and you scream, "DON'T FUCKING HOUND ME WITH THIS SHIT!" And drive away without paying.

That's what it's like. When the city can't decide if a single transportation element that carries 2 million people a year is worth doing maintenance on, whose operation is largely funded by its own ridership and federal money, the assessment that needs to happen is whether the city government would mistake its ass for the hole in the ground that Mayor Nickels would like to dig through downtown.

Can we even begin to list the failures here? 1) Both our dailies pass on a wildly inflated repair estimate released to aid the campaign to build a new monorail, 2) we learn monorail profits have been regularly diverted to other programs instead of its own maintenance and operation, 3) while the monorail trains were being restored from their collision, a March list of $4.3 million in items needing repairs was submitted to the City Council, who decided to delay funding the repair until the monorail was running again, 4) and when repair seems inevitable, the City Council suggests junking the trains because they keep breaking down.

Now give us a second while we wait for our aneurysm to pass.