Where the money goes

MSNBC tracks SMP's budget and follows the money trail. In short, they kept a skeleton crew of under 70 employees by outsourcing much of the legal and consulting work

About $23.8 million of the Seattle Monorail Project's total 2005 budget is slated for consultants, ranging from individuals to large law, accounting and environmental firms. That's one of every four dollars in a $93.4 million agency budget that includes capital costs, or more than half of the agency's $42.7 million operating budget...

By comparison, Sound Transit, operating with a different business model, employs more than 300 people and has a proportionally much smaller consulting budget -- only about 8.5 percent of its operating budget.

Wondering how much the bastards who dreamed up the idiotic finance plan made off with?

SMP also spent almost $250,000 on two consultants whose primary responsibilities included developing the agency's financing plan -- a plan that was scrapped just 10 days after details became public...

Seattle-Northwest Securities, the agency's financial adviser and the firm largely responsible for developing the bond structure plan the agency quickly killed, was paid more than $237,000 since 2003.

SNS was allegedly hand-picked by ex-SMP Director Joel Horn.