By Erica C. Barnett
Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm, who replaced former agency director Peter Rogoff in September 2022, announced her resignation Tuesday afternoon—two days before the Sound Transit board was scheduled to discuss her performance evaluation. The board’s executive committee went into a lengthy closed session last week to discuss Timm’s review, then ended their public meeting, leaving several agenda items unaddressed, for lack of a quorum.
Officially, Timm is leaving “in order to return to the East Coast to take care of family matters.”
In an email to staff on Tuesday, Timm wrote that she has “been struggling to balance the needs of long-distance care and support for my aging father with the intense requirements of leading Sound Transit as CEO. Over the past week in collaboration with Board Leadership, I came to the difficult, but I believe the correct, conclusion that my family needs more of my focus. While not impossible, it would be incredibly challenging for me to maintain a split focus while maintaining the intense level of support and stability Sound Transit deserves from its CEO as we enter into a historic level of openings and new construction.”
Timm has come under fire in recent months for delays, cost overruns, and a perceived lack of urgency on big-picture priorities like Sound Transit’s regional light rail expansion, which will require the agency to rapidly ramp up to spending more than $4 billion on capital projects every year.
In a report to the agency last week, a technical advisory group expressed consternation that Sound Transit was behind schedule on many of the recommendations the group issued back in February, such as hiring three directors to oversee major capital projects, empowering staff to make decisions without top-down approval, and repairing “broken trust” between the board and staff, led by Timm.
Prior to joining Sound Transit, Timm headed up the Greater Richmond (Virginia) Transit Company, a smaller transit agency that oversaw bus routes serving about 31,000 people daily.
During her time at the agency, Sound Transit reinstated fare enforcement, moved toward a flat $3 fare for light rail, and got ready to open a new Eastside-only “starter line” after faulty construction on the I-90 light-rail bridge crossing led to massive delays on the East Link project, which voters approved in 2008.
Other delays were largely out of Timms’ hands, including the decision to consider major changes to the Sound Transit 3 light-rail map voters adopted in 2016, including the elimination of the Midtown station, the relocation of a station in South Lake Union, and a decision to bypass the Chinatown/International District and instead build new stations in Pioneer Square and SoDo, to the north and south of the CID.
The cost of several projects ballooned while Timm led Sound Transit in part because some contractors began charging premiums to Sound Transit to cover what they perceived as the extra risk of working with the agency, such as financial losses due to construction delays.
The technical advisory group noted Sound Transit’s fractured relationship with contractors in its report, saying that contractors preferred to bid for work with other agencies, like the Washington State Department of Transportation, over Sound Transit “You want to be the owner of choice not because it’s a good feather in your cap, [but] because you’ll get competitive bids,” TAG member Grace Crunican said last week.
According to a press release announcing Timm’s departure, the board “is expected to appoint an interim CEO in the weeks ahead.” The board’s next meeting is on Friday.
Finding a permanent CEO for the agency could be an arduous process. Although the position pays significantly more than other executive-level government positions, like mayor—Timm’s base salary was $375,000 a year—the job requirements are specialized and growing more so as the agency enters its biggest-ever capital expansion phase. After Timm’s predecessor, Peter Rogoff, announced he was leaving 2021, it took Sound Transit well over a year to offer the job to Timm, in a process that was shrouded in secrecy.
It’ll probably take 14 months to replace Timm. Should we start a pool now for how long her successor is going to last?
I’m still waiting for that Monorail I voted YES on like three times…
Let it go, man. Ancient history.
WPPSS on wheels…..
Good riddance. Julie Timm was utterly despised by her staff and contractors alike.
Boosters of public transit would be wise to consider what we, collectively, can do to change the governance structure of Sound Transit. For the life of me, I do not understand why the Sound Transit Board is set up the same way as the old Metro governance structure that the Court overturned it as being unconstitutional because the Board were not directly elected.
There is no doubt that whomever is chosen as CEO of Sound Transit will have a tough job. The job might be somewhat easier if Board Members were also held accountable for the agency being behind schedule and over budget on every element currently under construction.
Why was she despised by them? Truly curious what the issues were. All I could see is that nothing seemed to be changing (other than the political interference clown car increasingly seems to be on a record tear lately…)
Well Brian, if you read some of the many articles about why she’s leaving, a huge part why staff hate her is because most every decision, no matter how minor, has to clear her desk. People who have lots of education and professional credentials in management, engineering, finance, and so on — people with significantly more experience that her — have been reduced to lowly supplicants. Much of this has been documented by the Technical Advisory Group (see following story) for their rather harsh review of Sound Transit. She’s also incredibly defensive, tone deaf, and a bit of a windsock.
In the Cunningham v. Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle case, the Dwyer ruling had several aspects. First, he ruled that Metro was a general purpose government (e.g., waste water, transit, and latent solid waste). Second, its federated structure violated the one person one vote standard of Carr. In the ST example, it is a special purpose government and the violation is not as extreme.
ST has weakness in both capital and service delivery. The Crunican committee assumes that the ST3 capital projects are correct.
Hats off to Julie and I wish her all the best. As a light rail rider, I’ve appreciated much improved experience in the last six months, and the thoughtfulness placed on increasing safety and rolling out equitable fare enforcement. This is not an easy time to be a leader, and the governance structure of these regional and transit agencies has always eluded me. Why won’t more elected officials own this work?
Seems like every time I opened Twitter, the Times, etc someone was complaining, so this is my boosterism plug for public transit and people who still care to try and make it work, especially in most challenging times.