By Erica C. Barnett
It took three hours and 37 minutes—45 minutes longer than the new film The Odyssey—but a city council committee finally approved Mayor Katie Wilson’s updated Seattle Transit Measure sales tax proposal mostly intact; the 0.3-percent sales tax measure is now headed to the full council and ultimately the November ballot. Approval, with a potential new amendment or two, is a foregone conclusion: The committee that approved the proposal includes all nine city council members.
The transit measure, formally known as the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, first passed in 2014; its purpose is to provide additional King County Metro service hours in Seattle, although it has since been amended to include additional spending priorities.
So why such a lengthy meeting? Mostly because council members proposed 30 amendments—23 more than the the last time the measure was in front of the city council, in 2020. Some of these amendments, which I covered in detail two weeks ago, were substantive. Bob Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax to 0.2 percent, later amended to 0.225, would have placed a measure before voters that kept transit service stable rather than expanding it, for instance.
Others were non-substantive directives to the city’s transportation department (SDOT) and King County Metro to study various concepts and performance measures, like the idea of replacing full-size buses with van-like shuttles on low-ridership routes.
The other reason the meeting was so long is that council members—particularly Rob Saka, the long-winded committee chair—insisted on making lengthy speeches before, during, and after almost every amendment, including many where the vote (pro or con) was a foregone conclusion.
I posted live updates throughout the meeting on Bluesky, where you’ll sense my growing frustration with the council’s windbaggy posturing. The rhetoric reached an apex during a discussion about Saka’s amendment to use funding from the transit tax to pay for additional security officers and transit cops.
Supporters, including Saka and Bob Kettle, suggested additional officers might have somehow saved the life of Shawn Yim, the Metro driver who was killed in December 2025 after leaving his bus to pursue a man who had attacked him with pepper spray.
Dionne Foster, one of two votes (along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck) against Saka’s proposal, pointed out that about 10 percent of transit measure funding already goes to transit security, and noted that the city’s 2024 Transportation Levy (thanks largely to a similar push from Saka) included about $9 million in transit security funding that the city hasn’t even figured out how to use yet.
Saka said it’s obvious that Metro needs to hire more transit security, citing data that shows more people are reporting incidents on buses. (This could also be because more people are riding buses). In one such incident, a man broke out several bus windows, reportedly with a machete—a wide, thin blade commonly used in Central America. Saka fixated on this apparently exotic weapon, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated foreign accent—”a mah-chet-EEE! A mah-chet-EEE!”—and emphasizing his point by asking, “Is this a banana republic?”
Despite the lengthy, mostly one-sided debate, Saka’s amendment had plenty of support. It identifies transit security officers, behavioral health specialists, and transit cops as one of the uses for the transit funding measure. Twenty-eight minutes into that discussion, Dan Strauss used a parliamentary move to stop Saka mid-sentence, mercifully “calling the question” on the amendment, which passed 7-2. Here’s that moment:
Few of the remaining substantive changes to Wilson’s proposal moved forward.
As mentioned, Kettle’s amendment to reduce the size of the levy failed, with only Maritza Rivera joining Kettle in voting yes. Rivera, who often brings up her working-class origins in the Bronx, said she didn’t want anyone to suggest that she didn’t support transit. “I have so much support for the transit system, to include that for the almost first 30 years of my life, I exclusively used public transit,” Rivera said. Noting that sales taxes have the greatest negative impact on lower-income people, she continued, “We should not be judged by, sometimes, the decisions that we have to grapple with. It’s not just, do you support it or do do you not. It’s, we do, and there are other considerations.”
Another proposal from Saka, which passed as part of a consent package, directs SDOT, “in partnership with” Metro, to produce annual reports on a long list of data, including on-time performance and reliability; fare recovery rates along with a report on how Metro’s fare recovery compares to at least 20 comparable transit systems; fare compliance actions by Metro; and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served,” including year-over-year comparison reports.
As I mentioned at the outset, one reason this council had so many amendments this year is that they seem not to trust Metro to spend Seattle’s money wisely. Ten of the council’s 30 proposed amendments include requests for reports, which require Metro’s “participation.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The city can’t actually require Metro to do anything, which is why I described these amendments yesterday as a purely performative form of “accountability.” Metro may choose to dedicate staff time and funding to running down all the numbers and data the Seattle City Council is asking for with all these amendments (on Monday, Rivera said, she plans to introduce an amendment requiring reports on ridership across all routes serving all elementary, middle, and high schools across the city), but they are also free to ignore the council’s requests.
The council also spent considerable time yesterday debating how much of the transit measure should go toward capital projects like sidewalks and curb cuts, rather than transit service hours. A Saka amendment, which passed 5-4, directs SDOT to deliver a report to the council on any transit measure funding that goes unspent each year, and expresses the council’s “intent to reappropriate these funds” for capital projects.
Proponents for more capital spending argued that Metro wasn’t able to use all its funding for transit hours in the most recent levy and ended up using that money on capital projects anyway. Opponents, including Rinck, pointed out that the reason Metro didn’t use as many bus hours during the last levy is that there was a global pandemic that reduced ridership to virtually zero.
The bus system is still recovering from that pandemic, but there’s no particular reason to believe ridership won’t continue to rebound over the life of the next transit measure. A staffer attempted to explain this— “I think it’s always useful to remember that the last measure came right at the start of the COVID pandemic, we found ourselves with additional [transit measure] resources piling up, and so there was a decision made by previous councils and the executive to divert those resources to do more capital projects”—but Rivera cut off his explanation, saying, “Because they’re needed. I mean, that’s what I’m going to take away from that.”
A proposal from Rinck to reduce capital spending from $5 million to $2 million a year, predictably, failed, but a separate amendment from Strauss guarantees that at least 75 percent of the transit measure gets spent on transit service.
Saka’s proposal to reduce the term of the tax measure from 10 years to 7 (increased from Saka’s original 6.75-year proposal) failed 7-2, with only Saka and Rivera voting “yes.”
