Look out below !!!STEVE SEBELIUS: Look out below!
The Las Vegas monorail sits idle again, the victim of yet another piece of falling machinery. At week's end, it seemed more equipment has been dropped from the monorail's cars than employees from Donald Trump's payroll.
But seriously, folks. The monorail has had some trouble.
It opened months behind schedule, and saw its first accident in January when a drive shaft fell from a train. Once it did open, ridership lagged below numbers needed to pay off bonds, much less break even or make a profit. In August, an employee running a train manually opened the doors on the side of the vehicle that faced nothing but empty space rather than an adjacent platform.
Then this month, a 60-pound tire fell from a train after employees ignored an alarm. That incident shuttered the monorail during the MAGIC convention, one of the year's busiest, and the Labor Day holiday. Trains were running again until Wednesday, when a "two-pound metal object" fell to the ground on Audrie Street behind the Paris hotel-casino, but not before striking a live electrical line on the track and causing a "small electrical explosion," according to a Review-Journal account.
And this comes after the monorail's creative corporate structure was examined by both the Review-Journal's Omar Sofradzija and my colleague George Knapp in the Las Vegas Mercury. Both noted that a quasi-public, non-profit company actually owns the monorail's infrastructure, and that it has been given tax-exempt status by the state.
But Transit Systems Management, the private, for-profit management company that is in charge of the monorail, doesn't reveal how much it pays in executive salaries to Chairman Jim Gibson, who's also the mayor of Henderson, or Cam Walker, who's the son-in-law of monorail founder the late Bob Broadbent.
Response to the repeated problems with the monorail is curious. "It's unacceptable that the system that has been given to us is operating like this," says monorail spokesman Todd Walker, who is Cam Walker's brother. "We want to ensure that the contractor and operator delivers the system that we paid for."
But it isn't like the monorail sprung into existence yesterday and inherited a creaky, poorly built line from a disreputable predecessor. The Las Vegas Monorail Co., the non-profit side of the house, chose Bombardier Corp., the Canadian rail company, to operate the trains. On Thursday, monorail officials held a news conference to announce the system will be closed until an investigation is complete and the trains are deemed safe for carrying passengers. (Then again, the trains are safe for passengers right now, assuming the right doors open. It's pedestrians and drivers on the streets below who need to don hard hats and close sunroofs.)
And Regional Transportation Commission officials -- who to this point have been extraordinarily friendly toward the monorail, once even calling the system the "backbone" of transportation in the county -- have said plans to extend the system downtown (this time at full taxpayer expense) are on hold until the monorail is proven to be reliable and safe.
The problem with things like the monorail (much like the Nevada State College in Henderson, which Gibson also endorsed in his mayoral role) is that by the time these things are built, too much has been invested for them to be scrapped. Lagging revenue and safety problems should be a cautionary tale for RTC members when mulling that downtown leg.
It's not built yet. And maybe it shouldn't be.
Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 383-0283 or by e-mail at ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.