Category: Transit

Courts, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media, Transit

This Week on PubliCola: May 9, 2026
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

Cops burn through sick time, county official accused of stalking must wear GPS monitor, Sound Transit announces “affordable” ST3 alternative, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, May 4

Audit: Retiring SPD Officers Routinely Burn Through Months of Sick Time, Costing City Millions Each Year

An audit by the city’s Office of Inspector General shows that retiring Seattle police officers routinely hoard sick leave and use it all at the end of their careers, allowing them to accumulate full pay for those days (which would otherwise “pay out” at 25 percent of an officer’s salary) without providing evidence that they’re actually sick. The pervasive practice costs the city millions of dollars a year.

Tuesday, May 5

County Council Launches Action to Address Homelessness Authority’s Financial Issues

The King County Council is asking King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.

After “Cavalier” Social Media Posts, Judge Says County Assessor Accused of Stalking Must Wear GPS Monitor After All

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson tried to convince a judge that PubliCola’s coverage of stalking allegations against him, which he characterized as unfounded opinions on a “personal blog,” was to blame for the negative reaction to his social media posts gloating that he had convinced a judge that he couldn’t wear an ankle monitor. The judge didn’t buy it, and said he’d have to wear a GPS monitor after all.

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No Wonder the Pundit Class Can’t Stand Her: We Discuss the Mayor’s “Gaffes,” Shelter Buffer Zones, and the KCRHA’s Financial Plight

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we debated whether Mayor Katie Wilson is, as many pundits have recently argued, a “gaffe”-prone buffoon, or if she’s just saying things they don’t agree with. We also discussed a proposal (later withdrawn) to require shelter-free “buffer zones” around parks, child cares, and schools, and we talked about the fallout last week from a forensic audit of the regional homelessness authority.

Wednesday, May 6

Council Committee Approves Larger New Shelters Amid Cloud of Mayor-Council Conflict

A growing rift between the City Council and Mayor Wilson exploded (almost) into the open this week, after Wilson staffers made what many councilmembers and staff described as an inappropriate request to pull the mayor’s legislation to allow larger shelters because she was unhappy with some council amendments. At a meeting the afternoon before the vote, Wilson’s staff reportedly seemed to think they could tell the council, a separate branch of government, what to do.

Thursday, May 7

The Gaffe Faff: Wilson isn’t Misspeaking. She’s Delivering.

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit takes a swing at pundits who are aghast that Mayor Wilson is openly supporting lefty priorities like taxing the rich and painting bus lanes. These things only seem like “gaffes,” Josh writes, to people in denial that Seattle willingly elected a socialist who ran on the exact progressive agenda she’s now espousing.

Friday, May 8

The C Is for Crank: The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?

In my column, I wonder why elected officials from Seattle are playing nice about the latest Sound Transit 3 plan, which defers stations in Seattle (including Graham Street in the Rainier Valley, first promised in 1999) and cuts the entire Ballard line, at least until savings and “new revenue” (i.e. bonds regional taxpayers will still be paying back in the 22nd century) can be found.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Opinion, Transit

The News About Sound Transit Is Grim. Why Are Most Seattle Politicians Pretending It Isn’t?
Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers announced a revised, “affordable” capital plan for the regional rail system at a meeting of the agency’s executive board on Thursday. The proposal attempts to close a $34.5 billion budget shortfall by focusing on the “spine” of the system, from Everett to Tacoma, while putting off major projects in Seattle that helped the Sound Transit 3 plan pass overwhelmingly here, most notably including the segment from downtown to Ballard.  The agency will fully design the Ballard extension and the Graham Street and Boeing Access Road infill station but postpone all three “until new resources or third party funding can advance them,” as ST’s deputy director Alex Krieg put it yesterday.

Ryan Packer, at the Urbanist, has been covering this story closely (probably between the top-secret closed-door meetings with Mayor Wilson that had the Seattle Times editorial board spewing smoke from their ears this morning!), so I’ll direct you to their story earlier this week for all the details about the new plan.

What I want to focus on is the insistence of most members of the Sound Transit board on living in an alternate reality—one where stopping the line at Seattle Center is completing the first part of the “Ballard” line, and where taking on debt well into the next century is a sustainable way to fund a train system.

Board members, including those from Seattle, have insisted that the regional rail agency isn’t truly “deferring” anything and that the entire ST3 package approved by voters in 2016 will get built—just as soon as Sound Transit comes up with a plan to cut costs and get new resources to build out the system voters have been funding for the past 10 years.

During a Transportation Choices Coalition-sponsored panel about the plan earlier this week, Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The fact that part of the project does not appear in the ‘affordable’ plan does not mean that it is being canceled or delayed or deferred. And so one of the things that I want to see is just a really clear plan for, as we do that work, adding [the missing stations and rail lines] back into the plan. And I’m not even talking like any more revenue for this. It’s just that we need to get further along in the planning process, and then suddenly you’re going to see more stations kind of magically come back into affordability.”

King County Councilmember (and former city council member) Teresa Mosqueda echoed Wilson’s comments at the board meeting Thursday, telling Somers, “I heard you say that nothing is deferred indefinitely, that we are not abandoning any lines or projects, and that we are committed to final design, getting ultimately to Ballard, Issaquah, and wanting the infill stations. … I see this as a need to present a ‘Yes, and’ proposal. Yes, we hear you that the community and this board want the full Sound Transit 3, and we recognize in order to accomplish that, you need to have additional financing tools.”

What about those additional financing tools? Sound Transit board members, and many transit advocates desperate to complete the long-promised system, have laid their hopes on the state legislature, which last year rejected a proposal to allow Sound Transit to sell unprecedented 75-year bonds to pay for costs that weren’t included in the voter-approved plan. (Really, plans—the long-“deferred” Graham Street Station was supposed to built as part of ST1).

There’s currently little public discussion, outside reflexively anti-tax conservative media, about whether it’s a good idea to put taxpayers on the hook for this rail system until the 22nd century. For rail advocates, it seems to be a settled debate. And no one is talking much right now about what ST4 will include.

The only board member who has relentlessly insisted on speaking bluntly about what Sound Transit is actually proposing is City Councilmember Dan Strauss. Strauss is no one’s idea of a firebrand, but he is extremely protective of the neighborhood at the heart of his district, Ballard, and he’s made no secret of his outrage that the plan cuts defers postpones the Ballard extension for the foreseeable future. Ballard, as Strauss points out often, has been upzoned three times since voters approved ST3 ten years ago. It’s now designated as a “regional center” in the city’s comprehensive plan, the densest possible designation, and is slated for another upzone later this year. Thanks to all those new people living in Ballard, Sound Transit has projected daily ridership as high as 147,000 people along the Ballard segment—the highest ridership in the system.

“Sound Transit did not provide an approach that maximized ridership,” Strauss said at the TCC event earlier this week. “If they had, they would be looking at the dollar per rider figure that the Ballard Lake extension provided.”

At Thursday’s ST board meeting, Strauss asked the board, semi-facetiously, to change the name of the “Ballard Link initial segment,” which ends at Seattle Center, to the “Downtown tunnel” segment, “because that is being transparent with the public about what segments we are funding.” It’s too bad the other Seattle representatives on the board aren’t equally committed to being honest with voters about what we’re getting with Sound Transit’s new “affordable” plan.

Mayor Wilson, Transit

Fulfilling a Campaign Promise, Wilson Announces Denny Way Bus Lanes Coming This Year
Advocates and city and Metro staff surround Mayor Katie Wilson at Wednesday’s Denny Way bus lane announcement.

By Erica C. Barnett

It took electing a mayor who knows what it’s like to be on a bus that’s crawling through gridlock traffic to finally address a choke point on Metro’s Route 8 between downtown and Capitol Hill. The bus, which runs from Seattle Center to Mount Baker via Capitol Hill and Judkins Park, gets stuck in traffic as it heads east from Seattle Center toward I-5, where cars stack up for blocks waiting to enter the freeway.

On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale. The first phase, which will conclude later this month, will include a new south- and eastbound bus lane starting on Queen Anne Ave. and ending at 2nd Avenue, where the Seattle Department of Transportation will also add a bus “queue jump” lane to give buses priority.

Work will shut down for the World Cup in June and July and resume in August, when crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Dennybetween 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.

The new bus lanes will be funded with $4 million from the Seattle Transportation Levy. The Seattle Transit Measure, which funds additional Metro service (and will be up for renewal this year), will fund additional service hours on the 8.

Source: SDOT

About 8,000 people ride the 8 every day, and about 26,000 ride the routes that travel along Queen Anne Ave. and Denny way just north of downtown, which include the 1, 2, 8, 13, 24, 33, and the RapidRide D Line.

On Wednesday, Wilson was surrounded by members of the Transit Riders Union, which she co-founded and directed before becoming mayor, and the Fix the L8 coalition, which held a “race the L8” event last year in which people—including then-candidate Wilson— easily outpaced the snail-like bus while walking, dancing, unicycling, and hopscotching along the route.

Speaking at Wednesday’s announcement, Fix the L8 organizer Jason Li said he grew tired of hearing people say that Seattle can’t convert general-purpose lanes to bus lanes because we aren’t a big city with a thriving transit network like New York. “The thing is, the city has done this before, and it was a wild success,” Li Said. Just a couple of miles away, Madison Street used to be just like Denny—an arterial with two lanes in each direction that was chronically clogged with both local and I-5 traffic, and it had a slow and unreliable bus, just like route eight.” Think about what happens when you replace 5,000 cars with a fleet of 13 buses.”

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Wilson, the first mayor in recent memory who does not own a car, recalled joining up with other transit advocacy groups to form the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition to advocate for better mass transit in 2018. “I have to say, being stood up by your bus is honestly one of the most dispiriting experiences that you can have,” Wilson said.

“And I know every transit rider out there, here today and around the city, knows exactly what I mean. There’s just nothing that makes you feel [more] like you’re not valuable, like your time is not valuable. And it’s serious, right? You can lose a job because you’re half an hour late because your bus didn’t come. … This is our opportunity to start fixing this problem.”

As part of the Denny Way improvement exercise, SDOT came up with a list of nine additional congested corridors “where transit investment can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city overall.” These routes, detailed in an SDOT memo, could be priorities for future investments in transit.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

labor, Transit

Staffers Say Sound Transit Refused to Bargain on Return-to-Office Policy, Use of Consultants

 

Photo of Union Station by Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

But Sound Transit says they’re bargaining “in good faith,” and that staffers should have known they couldn’t work from home indefinitely.

By Erica C. Barnett

For months, Sound Transit staffers have been trying to negotiate with their bosses over what they describe as return-to-office mandate and an increasing reliance on consultants rather than staff. But, they say, the regional bus and light-rail agency has refused to bargain, ignoring or rebuffing their primary demands over months of negotiations that reached an impasse

Earlier this month, Sound Transit staff who recently joined the PROTEC17 union, including internal specialists who help oversee projects and keep track of costs, packed a Sound Transit board meeting to express their disappointment in the lack of progress. One staffer who testified accused Sound Transit of “stonewalling at the negotiating table”; another said the agency was pushing an “agenda of overspending, risky contract procurement and major sweeping changes without our input.”

This past March, after more than a year of interim leadership, the Sound Transit board appointed former King County Executive Dow Constantine as its CEO.

A Sound Transit spokeswoman, Rachelle Cunningham, said the agency “is committed to respecting employees’ rights to organize and to maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with our labor partners, grounded in inclusion, respect, and shared purpose.”

One major point of contention is Sound Transit’s return-to-office policy, which requires most staffers to come in to the agency’s office in the Chinatown-International District three days a week. (Staffers say they got just 30 days’ notice of the change). Because Sound Transit told employees they could work from anywhere in Washington state during the pandemic, some moved out of the Seattle area and are now expected to commute hours to the office after working remotely for the past five years.

Staffers told PubliCola Sound Transit never gave a clear reason for the policy change. “There really isn’t a good argument, as far as our work is concerned, to force everybody into one location,” one staffer, who requested anonymity to protect their job, said. “The only argument that’s been giving is the ‘revitalization of Seattle.'” Another staffer added that Sound Transit opened two new light rail extensions successfully during the pandemic, suggesting that employees could work effectively without coming in to a physical office.

For staffers who relocated outside Seattle on the belief that Sound Transit’s remote work policy would be ongoing, the sudden return-to-office mandate could mean factoring an hours-long unpaid commute into every workday spent at Sound Transit headquarters. “For me, it means being less productive—actually getting less work done, because so much of my time is going to be spent commuting,” the first staffer said.

Cunningham said the agency started implementing it return-to-office policy at the beginning of 2025, and that “there was never a policy that stated employees could live anywhere in Washington and work remotely on a permanent basis.” The union disagrees, arguing that return-to-office is a work condition that Sound Transit needs to negotiate with represented employees.

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The second Sound Transit staffer said parts of their job are now being done by contractors who were supposed to augment, but not replace, Sound Transit staff. “I had to kick, scream and claw myself into meetings” where they were previously part of decision-making, the staffer said. “These consultants don’t know what they don’t know in terms of Sound Transit processes.”

In addition to hiring more contractors to do agency work, Sound Transit is moving toward a new contract procurement method in which multiple contractors are awarded a single contract to compete for individual jobs. They fear that this, too, could be a way of boxing out Sound Transit staff in favor of  private contractors. “Leadership is hollowing out [and moving] our public agency towards a privatization framework, replacing us with consultants,” the first staffer said.

“There weren’t a lot of answers about the need for this big change,” the second staffer added. “It’s all up in the air, it’s all new, and there has been very little communication about our place in all this. …  There’s a lack of trust in internal staff and a feeling that we’re not important to the vision for the agency.”

Cunningham said there’s been “no change” in how Sound Transit uses contractors. “The need for consultant services changes to reflect the needs of project delivery and operations, but nothing is being done differently than in the past,” she said.

After the action at the board meeting November 6, PROTEC17 director Karen Estevenin said, “we have received proposals on some of our top issues, and had a decent negotiation session. We plan to keep up the solidarity and actions until we have an agreement we can all be proud of.”

Guest Contributor, Transit

Three Key Questions to Save Our Light Rail Future
Photo by Sound Transit Special Selection via Wikimedia Commons; CC-by-2.0 license.

By Claudia Balducci

It’s no secret that our region needed high-capacity transit yesterday — or better yet, four decades ago. As a lifelong transit rider and a regional transportation leader, I’ve spent much of my career fighting for East Link, passing ST3, improving transit service, and delivering the kind of system our communities deserve. This work is essential: transit connects people to opportunity, makes our region greener, and—more personally—helps my teenager find their independence.

The West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions alone are historic in scale—the largest public works undertakings in Seattle’s history. These extensions will connect two culturally and economically prominent Seattle neighborhoods that can be hard to access. That’s why traffic-free rail to these destinations has been part of our civic vision for decades.

But Sound Transit’s recently reported rising costs threaten our ability to deliver on ST3—the bold plan voters approved in 2016 to expand rail and bus rapid transit throughout King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. The reasons for these rising costs include increasing construction costs, high interest rates, and an uncertain federal transit funding picture. So, here’s the fundamental question: How do we meet the promise of light rail without breaking the bank?

I’m asking Sound Transit to consider three key questions this fall:

  1. Can we reimagine the second downtown tunnel?

ST3 originally proposed a second tunnel between the Chinatown–International District and Westlake Center to support a growing regional transit network. But before building new infrastructure, let’s explore whether technology and reliability upgrades could allow us to interline—running all three lines through the existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel.

Consider this: London plans to run more than 30 trains per hour in a tunnel that first opened during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, simply by upgrading to modern signaling systems. Surely, with similar technology, we can optimize Seattle’s existing tunnel—built during Ronald Reagan’s presidency—to meet our service needs. If feasible (and this will require detailed analysis from outside experts), using a single downtown tunnel could save billions—funds we could reinvest to bring light rail to Ballard and West Seattle. A central question is whether this can be achieved while maintaining reliable service. It’s a critical issue that deserves resolution.

  1. What strategies can we find to deliver projects faster and cheaper?

We must build on the work of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which I proposed during the last Sound Transit realignment process during COVID to identify cost-saving strategies. Can we break up transit megaprojects—an approach used by other mass transit systems across the globe—into smaller contracts to attract more bidders to a heated construction market, lowering costs and improving accountability? Can we streamline permitting at the local and state levels? And can we proactively acquire key parcels of land early to lock in real estate prices before they rise?

  1. Can we adopt service-led planning that puts riders first?

Service-led planning is the standard globally for delivering the best rider experience. Investments are prioritized based on how they support speed, reliability, and service integration. Voters endorsed ST3 for the freedom its services entailed, not the scale of what would be built. Therefore, the service enabled by any piece of infrastructure must be the highest priority.

Using these principles, if the existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel can support the operations of three light rail lines by using modern signaling technology and design standards, the second tunnel becomes a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Even better, interlining will improve the rider experience by supporting easier transfers across platforms, rather than forcing long walks to adjacent stations, or cumbersome transfers across whole neighborhoods. It could also solve the longstanding challenge of how to serve the Chinatown-International District without digging up that neighborhood yet again.

It’s easy to list reasons why something won’t work. The real test is imagining how it can. For every “that’s impossible,” we must ask “how can we?” In this moment of scarcity, our creativity is our greatest resource. At Sound Transit, we’ve shown we can innovate before. Now it’s time to do it again.

We owe it to our region to solve the real problem—connecting people region-wide—and leave no good idea unexplored.

Claudia Balducci is a King County Councilmember and Sound Transit Board Vice Chair