In his press availability yesterday, McGinn said the council was seeking to "delay" the Transit Master Plan by failing to release money to pay for it, threatening a potential 2011 light-rail measure. (The council put a proviso on the spending so that they could change the "scope of work" for the plan to exclude any specific mention of light rail to Ballard and West Seattle; so far, they've released $300,000 of the $600,000 total budget, two months after McGinn first proposed updating the transit plan.)

However: McGinn's own agency, the Seattle Department of Transportation, signed off on the timeline for finishing the plan; that timeline, 11 to 12 months, still gives McGinn plenty of time to campaign for rail; and McGinn doesn't actually need to wait for the study to be finished to forward a proposal to the council.

McGinn's spokesman Aaron Pickus contends that the two months the council spent negotiating over the language of the transit plan scope of work did constitute a delay, in that it won't allow the mayor's office to start building a political case for a rail ballot until two months later than he could have if the council hadn't put a restriction on the money. "The plan is to make the best argument for light rail," Pickus says. "You want to have the maximum time possible to do that."