Tag: Claudia Balducci

King County, Tech

King County’s Baffling Website Redesign, (Sorta) Explained
From King County’s “Services” web page.

By Erica C. Barnett

After the disastrous launch of a new website that crashed due to traffic from people seeking election results last November, the King County Council passed a budget proviso, or restriction, late last year—holding back $200,000 from the project until the county’s IT department produced a status update “addressing concerns about the King County website upgrade.”

That upgrade, which started in 2017, has cost King County taxpayers $15 million so far (not counting the salaries of county employees), and will be out of date as soon as 2027, when Sitecore—the county’s content management system—changes its technology for web platforms and will no longer support King County’s website. When that happens, the county will have to find a new content management system. (A content management system, or CMS, is the “back end” of a website; PubliCola, a much simpler site than the county’s, uses WordPress).

As we reported last year, the new website design is bare-bones—more than one county employee told us they thought it was an “interim” or “intermediate” step before the “real” website launched—and confusing to navigate.

Many basic government services are hidden somewhere in an alphabetical site index that’s often redundant or counterintuitive—the county assessor’s heavily used property mapping services is buried under the label “GIS services,” in addition to its official name, “Parcel Viewer,” for instance—and the main site features a list of seemingly random county services arranged in no discernible order.

Currently, for example, visitors to kingcounty.gov are greeted with a full screen about dog adoptions, followed by a banner about the March Presidential primary election, followed by highlighted links to King County Metro, rural traffic camera feeds, the pet adoption page (again), and the county’s “careers” site (which requires additional clicks to get to a list of jobs).

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“It’s not an improvement from what we had before,” County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, told PubliCola. “There have been improvements since [the new site] first went up—we’ve put in some requests for changes—but they’re modest. It’s things like borders and white space, and can we have pictures of the council members on their council member pages.” (Originally, the site included text-only links to text-only councilmember pages.)

Beyond those “aesthetic issues,” Balducci continued, “the biggest problem is that people need to be able to find what they need, and it’s just not easy. I stopped using the website to search for things that I wanted to find. I would just use Google, because that was far more reliable.”

A spokesperson for King County said the new website templates “were designed to be user-friendly based on modern best practices. The goal was to simplify content for improved navigation, ADA access, and translations.” The county uses Google Translate for all languages other than English.

At Tuesday’s meeting, county Chief Information Officer Megan Clarke, who became head of the IT department in November 2022, said the issues with the website stem partly from a lack of communication between the IT staffers who were creating the new website and the people who would ultimately have to use it. One example of this was when the IT division determined that 90 percent of web traffic went through 10 percent of the pages on the site, and assumed it would be fine to “eliminate 90 percent of the pages and keep the 10 [percent] that were meaningful. … Unfortunately, those assumptions weren’t vetted.”

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works is if this is a partnership.”

In King County IT’s official, written response to the proviso, the department emphasized how many times it met with people from county departments to discuss the website and noting that some departments haven’t reorganized their site content yet in the latest version of the content management system—suggesting, in effect, that the reason “some users experience challenges with finding what they are looking for on Kingcounty.gov” is because county departments aren’t doing their part or signed off on things and later changed their minds.

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works… is if this is a partnership.”

Clarke—taking a more conciliatory tone than the department’s official report—told the council that many of the county staffers who worked on the website didn’t have experience working with the platform they were using and didn’t get the training they needed. “There was not someone in charge who had done this before,” Clarke said. “KCIT was trying to manage something that really required a lot of depth and breadth of voices involved, and that just did not happen.  We treated the website as a project rather than a product.”

Clarke told the council she’s hiring an outside consultant to try to identifying some of the underlying issues with the site, including why it couldn’t handle traffic on a low-turnout odd-year election night, in order to fix some of the most glaring problems. (The King County spokesperson told PubliCola that the IT department did anticipate the spike in traffic on election night, and that “although [the site] initially failed to function properly, KCIT was able to resolve the issue on Election Night”—albeit long after everyone had turned to KING 5’s website, which had the results on time.)

was designed to handle traffic, and only failed when people were seeking results at 8:00, when they’re ordinarily available.

However, she noted, the county is facing a budget deficit; even if Sitecore can support the website for a couple of years after 2027, it doesn’t make much sense to sink more money into the current site.

“I look at it as, how much more do we want to sink in this area [if] we are going to move to something else?” Clarke said. “I’ve seen website projects with twice the number of pages finish on time and on budget. I absolutely know it’s possible.”

PubliCola has reached out to the King County Executive’s Office and the IT department and will update this post when we hear back.

Mayor Harrell, neighborhoods, Transit, Transportation

Light Rail Board Members Seek Middle Ground as Plan to Skip Chinatown, Midtown Stations Moves Forward
Dow Constantine and Bruce Harrell have proposed a “North-South” light rail plan that would eliminate planned Chinatown-International District and Midtown stations. A compromise proposal, sponsored by Claudia Balducci and Roger Millar, would restore the “spine” of the system and keep some connections to the CID.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Wednesday, in advance of a Sound Transit board meeting that could reshape a long-planned light rail expansion linking downtown Seattle to Ballard and West Seattle, King County Councilmember and Sound Transit board member Claudia Balducci proposed an alternative route that preserves the existing “spine” of the system while eliminating a planned station in the Chinatown International District (CID). Voters approved the expansion, called “ST3,” in 2016.

The last-minute proposal is a direct response to, and amendment of, another last-minute proposal backed by King County Executive Dow Constantine and Mayor Bruce Harrell, who is sponsoring the motion. That “north-south” plan, which has no cost estimates, engineering, or design, would take a new light rail station on Fourth Avenue in Chinatown off the table, eliminate a planned “Midtown” station that would have served First Hill, and add a new “south of CID” station a few blocks north of the existing Stadium station south of downtown.

The big advantage to his plan, according to Constantine, is that in addition to eliminating the disruptive and harmful impacts of construction in Chinatown, it would set the stage for a whole new “neighborhood” centered around the site of the current King County Administration Building.

Compared to the “north-south” proposal, Sound Transit board member Claudia Balducc said, “this option would mean less out of direction travel and better connections for South and East riders [and] retain a one seat ride from South Seattle, South King and Pierce to the CID.”

Balducci’s proposal, co-sponsored by Washington State Department of Transportation director Roger Millar, would re-connect the “spine” of the system—which, under all previous plans, would be split into segments when expansion lines to Ballard and West Seattle open in the 2030s—keeping a one-seat ride from Lynnwood to Tacoma and, importantly, preserving the existing connection between South Seattle and the CID, which Constantine’s plan would eliminate. Essentially, it would create a true Ballard-to-West Seattle line (which no previous plans would do) while preserving connections to Chinatown from the east and south.

Compared to the “north-south” proposal, Balducci said, “this option would mean less out of direction travel and better connections for South and East riders [and] retain a one seat ride from South Seattle, South King and Pierce to the CID.”

Either of the two north-south options would eliminate the “Midtown” station, which would come the closest of any station to the dense First Hill neighborhood—echoing a similar decision in 2005, when the Sound Transit board voted to scrap a long-planned station in the neighborhood, a decision that eventually produced the First Hill streetcar.

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“If Midtown Station goes away, then they need to understand that what they’ve done is eliminate the highest ridership station in all of ST3 and that is going to require that they mitigate the hell out of it,” said Transportation Choices Coalition Alex Hudson, who noted that many of the people who work in First Hill hospitals live south of Seattle and could have used the new light rail line to commute to their jobs. “That’s 15,500 people who were counting on excellent [rail] service and have been paying for it and won’t get it—that’s not small change. That’s a real harm.”

Mitigating for the loss of the Midtown station, which could come in the form of expanded bus or other transit service in the area, will add costs to the project—eating into any savings from eliminating the station, Hudson said.

TCC wants the Sound Transit board to keep an existing option, the Fourth Avenue “shallower” option, on the table; as long as they’re considering an unstudied plan, she said, the board should keep a more thoroughly vetted option on the table. Balducci has introduced a second amendment that would keep that option on the table, and said that since the new Constantine-Harrell plan will require a supplemental environmental impact statement, “we should use that time to also study and improve the 4th option as much as possible. Then we’ll have the ability to make the most informed choice,” Balducci said.

“Before we walk away from the option to have a great transit hub on 4th that could both serve the CID and connect our light rail lines most effectively to each other, Sounder, Amtrak and other modes, I’m asking that the agency look harder at ways to address community concerns,” Balducci added.

It’s unclear whether Balducci and Millar’s proposals will gain traction, or if the Constantine-Harrell plan has so much momentum that it will steamroll efforts to keep other options on the table. The board meets tomorrow at 1:30 pm.

Democratic Party, Elections, labor, Transit, Transportation

Sound Transit CEO Rogoff Out Next Year, Labor Council Wades Into Sawant Fray, 43rd Democrats Divided on Dow

1. Learn to trust the Fizz: Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff will leave the agency next spring. On Thursday, Sound Transit board members voted to approve the terms of Rogoff’s departure and queuing up a national search for his replacement.

The announcement came two weeks after the board removed what had seemed to be a standard one-year renewal of Rogoff’s contract from their regular agenda, after a nearly two-hour executive session in which board members discussed his performance as director of the agency. Board members also retreated to a lengthy executive session during Thursday’s meeting before emerging with the news that Rogoff “did not foresee continuing in his role,” in the words of board chair Kent Keel.

As PubliCola reported in early September, board members have spent the last month discussing whether to renew Rogoff’s contract, raising questions about Rogoff’s leadership style as well as large cost increases—largely for property acquisition—that forced the board to adopt a “realignment” plan for the voter-approved Sound Transit 3 package earlier this year. Mayor Jenny Durkan King County Council member Claudia Balducci, and King County Executive Dow Constantine are among the board members who brought up concerns publicly and internally.

According to a report by an independent consultant, Triunity, the cost increases were worsened by the fact that various divisions of the agency didn’t communicate with each other, thanks to a “siloed” organizational structure and a culture of keeping bad news under wraps. Another issue: Sound Transit, under Rogoff’s leadership, has been slow to make decisions that could reduce costs, such as choosing a single preferred alignment for light rail expansion instead of continuing to study many different options.

Durkan, one of two board members to vote against retaining Rogoff after allegations that he acted inappropriately around female staff, did not join in the round of praise for Rogoff that followed the board vote Thursday. After a round of effusive praise for Rogoff (Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus: “We should be very grateful as a board and a region for his expertise and skills”), Balducci’s comments focused mostly on Rogoff’s early years at the agency, calling him a steady hand when the agency was struggling to get its bearings

“We were trying… to build this incredibly ambitious and future-looking transit plan, to finally meet the promise of what we have needed and wanted in this region for over 50 years,” Balducci said. “Peter stepped in in the middle of that and quickly got his bearings and helped to bring us home.”

Rogoff will receive severance worth one year’s salary, plus unused vacation time and other benefits outlined in his contract. Speaking after the vote, Rogoff said he has found the job “simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting,” sometimes leaning more toward the latter. “I will continue to be the loudest cheerleader for Sound Transit’s staff and all of their accomplishments even after I step to the sidelines next year,” he said.

2. The King County Labor Council, which represents around 150 unions in King County, tweeted on Thursday urging Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant to stop “meddling” and “interfering” in the internal business of the Pacific Northwest Carpenters Union, which is currently on strike over a contract that a majority of members rejected over issues including pay, contract length, and parking reimbursements. “Ask how you can support instead of being a nuisance,” the Labor Council said.

Sawant began inserting herself into the debate earlier this month, when she issued statements and held a rally urging union members to vote “no” on the contract. Union leaders, including the head of the anti-Sawant Building Trades Union as well as the Carpenters’ Union itself, have repeatedly asked Sawant to stay out of their negotiations. “[N]o politician should be meddling in a private sector union contract negotiation,” Washington State Building Trades vice president Chris McClaine said. “It only helps those who want to destroy worker unions and take money out of workers’ paychecks.”

This week, Sawant issued a flurry of statements supporting the strike, touting her own promise to contribute $10,000 (up from an initial pledge of $2,000) to the carpenters’ strike fund, and showcasing a letter of support from several dozen carpenters’ union members for “stepp[ing] forward in solidarity” with the strike. The $10,000 pledge will come from the Sawant Solidarity Fund, which supports various political efforts and campaigns.

Sawant also said this week that she will introduce legislation to “require construction contractors to fully pay for workers’ parking costs, strengthen enforcement and penalties for wage theft, and restore [the] right to strike” at sites with a project labor agreement (PLA)—a bargained agreement between the union and contractors that prohibits workers from walking off the job. PLA sites in Seattle include the NHL hockey arena, the downtown convention center, and Sound Transit’s ongoing light rail construction.

It’s unclear when Sawant plans to introduce the legislation or what mechanism it would contain for requiring specific parking reimbursements, which are currently included in union contracts, not dictated by legislation.

3. The 43rd Legislative District Democrats failed to reach an endorsement for King County Executive at their endorsement meeting Tuesday night, a victory of sorts for incumbent Dow Constantine after a series of landslide votes for lefty candidates in other races. Constantine received a little over 43 percent of the vote to his challenger, state Sen. Joe Nguyen’s, 54 percent.

That may not seem like a blowout, but compared to the district’s sweeping support for other progressive candidates—city attorney candidate Nicole Thomas Kennedy, City Council candidate Nikkita Oliver, and mayoral candidate Lorena González all received first-round votes of at least 75 percent—Nguyen’s 54 percent showing looked limp.

“We cannot wait for the status quo to solve the problems that have been impacting us for decades and they especially won’t be solved by those who helped create them,” Nguyen said before the vote. Constantine responded to this by highlighting the county’s work responding to the COVID pandemic, including the imposition of a countywide vaccine mandate for indoor and large outdoor events. “This is the kind of difficult work that real leaders do. I’ve never been much for bluster,” Constantine said.

Affordability, Guest Contributor, housing, King County

Guest Post: New Affordable Housing Dashboard Promotes Transparency and Accountability 

by Claudia Balducci

It’s no secret we have a dramatic housing shortage in King County. This has real human consequences, leaving too many with insecure housing and contributing to an unacceptably high level of homelessness. Many people and organizations – public and private – have been working hard to tackle the problem. We’ve seen increased investment at all levels of government and from private companies, partnerships to provide affordable housing near transit, new funding sources to support subsidized housing, zoning changes to allow more housing in some areas, new regional collaborations, and much more.

But the headlines keep coming: housing costs continue to rise and COVID times have brought job loss and the risk of housing loss for many more people than before. Many thousands of families spend more than half their income on housing, leaving them just one extra expense away from homelessness. Questions should be asked:  Are our efforts enough? What more must we do to ensure that people have access to the housing that they need and deserve? To understand the answers to those questions and to be sure our efforts are working, we needed to know more.

That’s why I’m excited to share that this week the Growth Management Planning Council’s Affordable Housing Committee, which I chair, released a Regional Affordable Housing Dashboard to track our county’s progress toward our goals. This new tool will help hold us all accountable to the bold and ambitious goals set by the Regional Affordable Housing Taskforce to build or preserve 44,000 affordable homes by 2024 and 244,000 homes by 2040.

The dashboard will help jurisdictions track their progress, arm housing advocates with data to make their cases, and provide the public with information to hold elected leaders accountable.

To our knowledge, no dashboard like this has ever been built. The dashboard will help jurisdictions track their respective progress, arm housing advocates with data to make their cases, and provide the public with information to hold elected leaders accountable. The dashboard’s “Jurisdictional Snapshots” section offers information about housing affordability and policy enactment by city. Additionally, a wide variety of affordable housing data— from housing policies to transit-oriented development and displacement—are available for download either as raw data or charts.

The tool itself illustrates the power, and challenge, of working together. The Affordable Housing Committee, which is composed of 19 elected, nonprofit and business leaders, provided an umbrella for the hard work it took to identify data sets, analyze the data and reach agreement on how to interpret the data.  This collaboration across our county is something to celebrate.

Here’s what the dashboard tells us already:

• King County lacks an adequate supply of affordable homes for the lowest-income renters who must compete for the limited number of rental homes affordable to them in the private market. Only 27 units are affordable and available for every 100 extremely low-income households (those making between 0 and 30 percent of Area Median Income, or AMI).

  • Black households are severely cost-burdened (defined as paying more than half of one’s salary for housing) at twice the rate of white households. Twenty-six percent of Black households are severely cost-burdened, as compared to 13 percent of white households.
  • Our region established a goal to build or preserve 44,000 homes affordable to households with incomes at or below 50 percent of AMI between 2019 and 2024. To meet this goal, we need to create 8,800 affordable units per year; but in 2019, only 1,595 affordable units were created.

Continue reading “Guest Post: New Affordable Housing Dashboard Promotes Transparency and Accountability “ →

homelessness, human services, King County, Morning Fizz

Mercer Island Plans Homeless Ban, Shakeup at Homelessness Authority
Image via Wikimedia Commons

1. On Tuesday, the Mercer Island City Council is scheduled to vote on a proposal to ban all “camping” in the city, including sleeping unsheltered in public places and sheltering in a vehicle overnight. People who violate the ban—anyone who remains unsheltered in the city overnight—could be jailed for up to 90 days and fined $1,000 for each violation. Any vehicle that is used for overnight shelter, including RVs, could be impounded.

At a Mercer Island City Council meeting last month, Councilmember Jake Jacobson said the proposed ordinance “addresses public safety concerns [about] people who, but for this ordinance, would be staying in public properties for an infinite period of time and certainly are in a position to be of concern to people on the island. Fear—there is fear out there, and this is a way to deal with it.”

“And if people say they don’t want help and say, ‘I’m not going into shelter,'” Jacobson continued, “then they have made a decision to opt into the justice system.”

A federal appeals court ruling, Martin v. Boise, bars cities from passing outright bans on homelessness. Instead, it allows cities to ban sleeping outdoors unless there is no “available” shelter in the area—but the definition of “available” and in the area are very much open to interpretation.

The Mercer Island proposal gets around Boise by saying that police who encounter unsheltered people may direct them to shelter outside Mercer Island but on the Eastside, since Mercer Island does not have any homeless shelters. In practice, this means one of four shelters—one for women, one for men, one for families with children, and one for youth. In exchange for these services, Mercer Island would pay a consortium of Eastside service providers a total of $10,000 a year.

The bill defines “available” broadly, allowing police to enforce the law against people who can’t be admitted to their designated shelter because of the “voluntary actions of that person,” including :intoxication, drug use, unruly and/or assaultive behavior and like behaviors.” Under proposed ordinance, for example, if a homeless man was ineligible for the lone men’s shelter because he was exhibiting behavioral health symptoms that made him “unruly,” he could be seen as refusing shelter and jailed.

“If people say they don’t want help and say, ‘I’m not going into shelter,’ then they have made a decision to opt into the justice system.”

Mercer Island Police Chief Ed Holmes assured the council that then police were interested in helping homeless people, not further marginalizing them. “Rest assured… we won’t take enforcement action until there’s repeated issues,” he said. But Sergeant Mike Seifer, who presented the legislation to the council, noted that it was aimed at addressing a specific group of people—”about four individuals that we deal with on a very serious or consistent basis” in public spaces, plus “about six or seven that are in vehicles that are consistently coming into contact with the officers.”

One way or another, the law would allow Mercer Island police to remove those ten or so people from the island, either by jailing them in another city, such as Issaquah, or by sending them to a shelter off the island. Councilmember Craig Reynolds, who cast the lone “no” vote against the ordinance on first reading, noted that the city’s jail contracts don’t come cheap—jailing a person costs the city about $200 a day, or up to $18,000 for the maximum 90-day sentence.

2. King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci  will replace her fellow Councilmember Reagan Dunn on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, as we reported exclusively on Twitter Friday.

In January, as PubliCola reported, governing board member Zaneta Reid took Dunn to task for positions he has taken on homelessness, including his opposition to the “Health Through Housing” sales tax proposal and his efforts to fund one-way bus tickets out of King County. “Mr. Dunn—Reagan—I have not seen one article that you have been compassionate or even cared about what we’re sitting at this table doing.  … How can I trust that you have the best interests of those that we are serving at forefront?” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan shut down the conversation before Dunn could answer. Continue reading “Mercer Island Plans Homeless Ban, Shakeup at Homelessness Authority” →

Equity, Mayor Durkan, Transit, Transportation

Financial Crisis Forces Sound Transit to Consider Tough, Complicated Choices

By Erica C. Barnett

Over the past few months, Sound Transit, the regional agency tasked with building light rail to Ballard and West Seattle lines as well as extending the main light-rail “spine” to Everett and Tacoma, has been dealt a double blow of bad news. Last June, agency staff estimated that total revenues could fall short by $8 billion to $12 billion by 2041, the original end date of the Sound Transit 3 program voters approved in 2016. (More recent projections have adjusted that projection down slightly, to a range of $6.1 billion to $11.5 billion, but the numbers remain grim).

Then, earlier this month, Sound Transit announced that the cost to build the ST3 package, which includes elevated lines to West Seattle and Ballard, had increased by about $8 billion. The combination of the shortfall and cost inflation has created an “affordability gap” of about $11.5 billion.

Referring to the chart above, which shows a green line marked “ending balance” plummeting below zero beginning in 2029, Sound Transit board chair Kent Keel said last week, “I’ve never seen a chart where the budget dropped off the chart … so that’s pretty sobering for me.”

Keel made his comments during a board workshop on Sound Transit 3 “realignment” last Thursday, where the general outlines of two broad options emerged.

The first, which staff have dubbed the “expanded capacity” approach, would involve finding additional resources, such as grants, federal dollars, or new taxes, to boost Sound Transit’s revenues and make the newly inflated project possible. The second, called the “plan-required” approach, would involve some combination of delaying elements of the project, permanently reducing the scope of projects, and eliminating some projects altogether. According to a lengthy report on the options, this alternative would only come into play “in the event that new financial resources are not secured.”

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Presented with these conflicting options, several board members insisted that the solution was doing “both.” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, for example, said, “We have to be working hard at what the resources we have, but [we also] have to look at what are other potential sources of revenues,” she said, adding, “Every time we pull the covers over ourselves, we fail ourselves. We have to be thinking of the future.”

To that end, the options Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff presented last week included: New federal funding; direct grants from the state; increasing the agency’s debt capacity; raising the rental car tax rate; purchasing lower-cost debt through federal loan programs; and increasing fares.

Most of these options come with significant caveats and downsides. For example, Sound Transit is already the nation’s largest Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act borrower, making it less likely the agency will be approved for additional debt. Rental-car tax revenues are currently negligible because of the COVID-related decline in travel. And any increase to the agency’s debt capacity would require either 60 percent voter approval or a change to the Washington State Constitution (and would lower the agency’s credit rating, resulting in higher interest payments.)

Finally, Rogoff said, the likelihood of more federal grant funding is dampened somewhat by the fact that Sound Transit already receives one-tenth of the Federal Transit Agency’s grant funding nationwide; “We would certainly love to get a higher percentage of that program, and we certainly would love to get an additional program funded, but there is certainly a limit to what one transit agency can call on from that program, or at least there has been to date,” Rogoff said on Thursday.

Complicating matters are some of the six factors the board will use to decide how to prioritize voter-approved projects in light of the budget gap. For Seattle residents, two factors could end up working against the city’s projects, including light rail to Ballard and West Seattle.

The first is whether a project serves to “complete the spine” of regional light rail, meaning the central line that will eventually extend from Tacoma to Everett.  This portion of the plan requires the construction of a second downtown transit tunnel, but Sound Transit does not consider that tunnel part of the “spine.” Instead, the tunnel—which will also connect downtown to West Seattle and Ballard—is considered a Seattle-only project for planning purposes. (Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick said the tunnel is funded regionally, the costs split between the three “subareas” within the Sound Transit taxing district). The upshot could be that when Sound Transit gets around to picking projects to delay or cut, West Seattle and Ballard could be first in line because Seattle already got a “Seattle” project in the form of a second downtown tunnel.

The second issue is equity—defined, for Sound Transit’s purposes, as how well a project serves low-income people, people of color, and people with disabilities within a one-mile radius of a project, such as a station. Although many ST3 projects scored low on equity, some of the worst were in Seattle. They included the West Seattle line (which scored medium-low), the downtown tunnel (medium-low) and the Ballard extension (low). This could bump these projects lower down the priority list.

Some board members argued that the definition of “equity” Sound Transit uses is narrow and self-defeating, since stations tend to raise property values (and prompt gentrification) in their immediate vicinity, driving down their equity scores even if they serve people from less-affluent, more diverse parts of town. For example, an infill station at NE 130th Street, in board member Debora Juarez’s Seattle City Council district, ranked low on the list, despite the fact that the station will serve people commuting into the area from elsewhere.

“I have a real problem with the equity” metric, because of the way it narrowly defines a station’s service area, Juarez said. “The whole point of having these stations is to get people to work, to the hospital,” Juarez said, referring to the UW Medical Center hospital near the station. “Taking three buses to get to the north end is ridiculous.”

The board isn’t expected to adopt a realignment plan until next summer, at the soonest. Although board chair Keel began a blue-sky discussion last week about how Sound Transit could cut costs or raise money—beginning with the rental-car tax, which would raise a negligible amount—board member Claudia Balducci, a King County Council member from Bellevue, cautioned against coming up with lists of cuts or new taxes before a thorough discussion.

“When we did this ten-plus years ago”—in the wake of the 2008-2010 recession—”we had a very deeply researched piece of documentation that was given to us with a lot of backup behind it,” Balducci, who first joined the Sound Transit board as Bellevue mayor in 2020, said. “I feel like we’re at that early stage of maybe trying to provide high-level feedback about the parameters around additional study that we want to see. … It feels like we’re rushing toward a solution when we haven’t identified the problems.”