Sound Transit Shortfall Worst For Bellevue

I didn't understand the subarea spending concept. This is good to know, I always thought that Snohomish County was getting screwed by funding light rail in Seattle and Bellevue while it only got buses and an carpool on-ramp or two.

The only way ST survived was subarea equity. I can't imagine this region supporting transit any other way.

No less likely (tunnel) just later. They will do what they did on the first line. They will delay starting it, then they will build it slowly and finally it will be “on schedule and under budget”.

Sound Transit has known about these shortfalls for quite some time. They are happy to have the fight over routing on the Eastside because they now will blame Kemper and homeowners for the (needed) delay.

People outside of downtown Seattle just don't want or need that much “mass transit”.

If they can't make a bus system profitable, then why add even more “infrastructure” especially since this regions population has plateaued and is probably shrinking.

What's your definition of “quite some time?” Sound Transit 2 passed less than 2 years ago, and the full impact of the recession on sales tax revenues has only been known for a short time. I don't think Sound Transit's crystal ball works any better than any other government agency's, but at least they have a plan for dealing with budget shortfalls, unlike King County or the state government.

And that's one of the reasons that the “Seattle got a tunnel!” complaints ring somewhat false. Seattle did get a tunnel, but Seattle is paying for it.

1) If people outside of downtown Seattle “just don't want or need that much mass transit” then why do they keep voting for mass transit?

2) For the thousandth time: downtown Seattle is growing; Seattle is growing; the region is growing.

I can't wait for the shiny train to take me from Downtown Seattle all the way to Redmond. I know it's many years off, but that'll be a great thing. I also know I'm not the only one.

If we did subarea spending on WSDOT projects, eastern washington would be screwed.

According to the census, it's anything but “plateaued”.

Is there a site that shows revenue and spending on highways for WA?

The west side clearly has much more revenue, but we also have much more spending, even without the tunnel.

I would like to see the numbers.

They use the same taxes for ST1 so they've known since before the vote that would be shortfalls of what they were telling us. They only have a plan because they just don't provide the most basic service they promised.

Whereas the other governments have ongoing commitments such as first responders, jails, health care and court systems, Sound Transit just doesn't deliver transit on time or for that matter on budget. ST collected light rail taxes (KC-N) for 12 years without providing one ride.

I found this on WSDOT's site

County-by-County Comparison

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/01173667-1…

Looks like King County is pretty much even, it gets out what it puts in almost dollar for dollar. Garfield county gets over $5 per dollar it puts in!

Wrong. Sound Transit learned about the 3.1 billion shortfall last fall. They learned about the additional shortfall this summer. The shortfall is based on plummeting sales-tax revenue caused by the recession, nothing they knew about before the ST2 vote.

So Seattle's tax revenue only constricted by 16% from projections due to the recession while it's suburbs constricted an rough estimate of 28% (just averaged out the other subareas).

Yep, the city as we know it is dying, and the suburbs are the future!!!

All this talk about falling revenues shows that while not very progressive, sale tax has a built-in economic stabilizin effect: Bad economy equals less taxes taken out of the economy, good economy equals more taxes. Now if they could only get the spending portion of it to be counter-cyclical.

You should know by now that Facts to John Bailo is like Water to the Wicked Witch.

Thanks! I really appreciate the effort and went to check it out.

There is something way wrong.

Well Garfield only gets a grand total of $55M and they give only $10M – so that covers about 1% of the tunnel project. Okay.

But, Asotin County [raised $1,923,480,000 spent $1,517,966,000 (0.79)] next door has a $400M less spent than raised forecast, if you believe the numbers, I don't. Asotin County has a population of 20,000.

Sad that such huge error would appear on a WSDOT document – makes you wonder about doing something harder, like…

Well, it doesn't look like the subsidies are like the days of yore, but we still on the west side give a little to the east.

Yes, if we could run surplus budgets during booms and big deficits during busts we would finally test the basic theory of Keynes.

Right, cause how else are we going to get our fruit over here and get over there to go camping.

Or we could not spend our surplus during the boom times and then spent it (as opposed to huge deficits) during busts. But try getting a politician not to spend surplus.

We are in agreement – run a surplus during the boom (pay down debt or ha ha put it in savings) then when we are in a bust spend spend spend.

I don't understand the sources in that document either. It seems to say that it doesn't include gas tax for example (“collected at the wholesale level, not the retail level”). Also what counts as something benefiting that county? highway mountain pass work certainly isn't done just for the few people who live nearby.

Bus systems are supposed to be profitable?

Let's make our car systems profitable instead. We can start with a $5 toll on each street, each way. It won't cover the entire cost, but it can chip into the thousands of dollars in taxes each of us spend to subsidize car drivers.

Now all we got to do is convince congress that is up for election every two years on this theory.