King County Council member Pete von Reichbauer (R-7), who lives in Federal Way, along with several other Sound Transit board members and state Sen. Tracey Eide, who also lives in Federal Way, proposed adding $24 million to the county’s 2012 budget to complete full environmental planning for light rail all the way to Federal Way, as opposed to its previous plan, which would have only completed an environmental impact statement for a line to S. 200th St. in Kent.
The plan proposed today does not include any funding for actual construction. Officials at today’s briefing, including Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl and King County Executive Dow Constantine, said they hoped to fund the extension with a combination of federal funds, state money, and, potentially, new local revenues.
“My goal in offering this proposal now is to put the Federal Way area at the front of the line by getting this work done,” von Reichbauer said. Earl said there was enough money within Sound Transit’s existing budget to fund the plan.
Specifically, the proposal would provide funding to do planning, engineering, and environmental work to connect South 200th St. to the Federal Way Transit Center; technical work to choose an alignment to Federal Way; decisions on station locations; cost estimates; and the assurance that the project is “shovel ready” for funding from federal, state, and potentially local sources.
Federal Way Mayor Skip Priest threw a tantrum after Sound Transit announced that it would no longer be able to complete light rail to Federal Way on the adopted timeline because revenues in South King County were falling short. Siding with Sound Transit, Eide refused to sign off on legislation proposed by Priest that would allow cities to bail on regional transit authorities if their plans change, mandating that ballot titles state the exact duration of any tax, prohibiting capital and operation costs from being included in a single ballot measure, and ordering Sound Transit to do an annual audit and pay for it.
Although officials today were conciliatory toward Federal Way—as von Reichbauer put it, “our goal is to work with cities all along the [rail] alignment … we hope they will respond to this great opportunity”—an internal Q&A inadvertently including in my press materials today was much more candid about Sound Transit’s relationship with the city, “We certainly hope that Mr. Priest will support the process. It has not always been clear what Mr. Priest wants since he has promoted bills that would make it much more difficult to extend [light rail] service. … If Mayor Priest keeps this up, getting light rail to Federal Way will only happen despite of him rather than because of him.”
It gets better: “As of now, Federal Way has a hostile and unproductive stance toward Sound Transit. Unfortunately, Federal Way was the only South King County city in the [light rail] corridor that did not sign a letter of support for the [federal funding] grant proposal. … Despite this lack of cooperation, Sound Transit remains committed to working with Federal Way to make light rail a reality for that city and beyond.”
Von Reichbauer said he and Sen. Eide had meetings planned “in the very near future” with Federal Way city officials.
Sound Transit relies on sales taxes, and taxes collected in each of Sound Transit’s geographic “subareas” must be spent in that subarea. Although revenues have fallen short in all of Seattle’s subareas during the recession, South King County has been hit hardest, with revenues falling 32 percent short of projections—$894 million less than projected by 2023, the end of Sound Transit 2. The funding gap for the project is about $300 million.
At today’s press briefing, Constantine (after joking, “I don’t have to run for another year and a half”) indicated he would be open to getting rid of subarea equity, calling the policy “an artifact of an earlier day in Sound Transit’s history when we hadn’t established a track record of trust.” Subarea equity, he said, is “very much hobbling us in South King County, which simply does not have the infrastructure” to fund all the projects planned in the area during the recession.
However, Sound Transit CEO Earl noted that all of the agency’s subareas are suffering, and said, “Even if we didn’t have subarea equity, our revenues are down 25 percent, so there is not currently enough money to do the actual construction between Kent/Des Moines and S. 272nd [Federal Way] at this time.”
