Tag: Sound Transit

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

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers

By Erica C. Barnett

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discuss King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment to a $675,000-a-year job as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. We also poured one out for the short-lived candidacy of Tanya Woo, who briefly filed to run for City Council District 2 (the seat she lost to Tammy Morales before getting appointed to the council and losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck last year).

It’s somewhat unusual for an incumbent city attorney to have so many challengers this early in the race (in addition to Evans, Rory O’Sullivan and Nathan Rouse are running). But in the case of Davison, it’s hardly surprising.

In her first unsuccessful campaign, in 2019, Davison ran against Debora Juarez from the right. As part of her appeal to voters, Davison proposed warehousing unsheltered people in former big-box stores, called climate change a pointless “luxury” issue compared to removing encampments and making Seattle “clean”; and claimed the city’s streets were covered in human feces.

In her second campaign, for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison ran as a Republican, announcing that she had left the Democratic Party as part of the Walk Away movement headed up by (later-convicted) January 6 rioter Bradon Straka. (State elections are partisan, but Washington state does not require voters to register as a party member, so there’s no way to confirm Davison’s previous Democratic affiliation).

After losing that race in the primary, Davison defeated police abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021, running on a law and order platform. She has spent her term advocating for the right to prosecute people who use drugs in public, crack down on sex workers, and banish people who commit drug and sex work misdemeanors from parts of the city.

Under Davison, the city shut down community court, which provided an alternative to jail for people accused of certain misdemeanors; created a new “high utilizers” program in which people arrested over and over are subject to a higher level of punishment; and began pursuing charges aggressively under a new drug law that makes simple drug possession or using drugs in public a misdemeanor. She also supports limiting the number of times people are allowed to overdose before they’re thrown in jail.

We debated whether Davison is really a Republican (she is, ) or if she’s maybe some kind of moderate Democrat (as Sandeep seems to believe).

Last month, Davison belatedly joined a lawsuit filed by other cities against a Trump executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that won’t help the federal government conduct immigration raids—a Seattle policy for many years. Unlike other city attorneys, however, Davison’s justification for joining was that the order violates “local control,” a tepid reason at best.

Notably, Davison has declined to denounce Trump generally or say whether she voted for Trump or Harris in the last election (we asked), and the policies she supports are, very generously, on the far right end of Seattle’s political spectrum. (Although, again, she denounced the Democrats and joined a national Republican movement in 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, and ran on a Republican ticket that was headed by a far-right MAGA extremist who went on to deny the election results.)

Check out our discussion on this week’s episode:

 

Guest Contributor, Opinion, Transportation

Sound Transit’s CEO Search Should Be About Leadership, Not Political Deals
Image via Soundtransit.org

By Francois Kaeppelin and Trevor Reed

Imagine applying for a high-powered job where you get to pick half of the hiring committee. That’s exactly what’s happening at Sound Transit, where King County Executive Dow Constantine is asking his own appointees to give him the top job.

As King County Executive, Constantine holds a built-in advantage on Sound Transit’s board: He personally nominated half of its 18 members and sits on it himself. With the rest of the board filled by top leaders from Pierce and Snohomish counties, their appointees, and the state Secretary of Transportation, Constantine still wields disproportionate influence over who gets the job. No credible hiring process would ever allow an applicant this level of influence over their own selection.

Think about that for a minute: the person who appointed half of the board members is now asking them for the agency’s top job. While Constantine has stepped aside from voting on his own candidacy, the people he chose are still there, making the decision.

This isn’t just a technical oversight—it’s a blatant conflict of interest. When those in power have a direct hand in choosing their own decision-makers, it becomes nearly impossible to say that the selection process is truly fair.

A second issue with this appointment is that Sound Transit has chosen to keep much of this process behind closed doors. The agency has publicly stated that state law allows them to hold secret hiring meetings. But the law they cite doesn’t require this secrecy—in fact, it explicitly encourages transparency, urging public agencies to seek community input even when not legally required to do so.

While other agencies openly disclose CEO candidates, Sound Transit has chosen, once again, to shield the process from public scrutiny.

The lack of transparency is compounded by hiring criteria that favor insiders over expertise. The job posting includes a requirement for an “understanding of the local cultural and political landscape.” At first glance, this requirement sounds reasonable—but in practice, it creates an artificial barrier to outside talent and reinforces the same system that has failed to deliver on-time and on-budget transit projects. Instead of recruiting the best leader for the job, Sound Transit is making it easier for a political insider to take control.

The new CEO will be responsible for making decisions that impact your daily commute, whether you’re heading to work or getting around the city. If political favors influence the selection process, there’s a real risk that the agency will prioritize insider interests over public benefit. This could lead to delays, rising costs, and a transit system that fails the millions of people who rely on it.

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For Sound Transit to deliver on its promises, the public must have confidence in its leadership selection process. While Dow Constantine brings decades of experience in public service, the next CEO should be chosen based on their qualifications and vision—not because they have been around the longest or have the right political connections. A truly accountable process requires public disclosure of finalists, clear evaluation criteria, and meaningful public input.

Other cities have recognized that effective transit leadership requires fresh perspectives, not just political familiarity. Canada’s VIA Rail, for example, brought in international talent to modernize its intercity network. Seattle needs a CEO who can bring innovative solutions to the agency’s long-standing challenges.

Sound Transit is responsible for billions of taxpayer dollars and the future of mobility in our region. This decision must be made with full public trust. To make this possible, the Board must:

• Fully disclose the criteria they’re using to judge candidates;

• Publicly disclose the list of finalists before making a hiring decision;

• Host a public hearing on the finalists; and

• Establish a structured public feedback process to inform the CEO selection.

If Sound Transit is confident they have the best leader, why keep it a secret? Riders deserve transparency—before it’s too late.

Francois Kaeppelin is a transportation policy researcher focused on transit governance, infrastructure development, and equity. He currently serves as Legislative Advocacy Director for Seattle Subway, working to advance transit governance reform in the Seattle metro area. Previously, he conducted research at the National Center for Sustainable Transportation and the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, focusing on the impacts of freeway construction on communities of color, barriers to transit-oriented development, and regional transit coordination in California.

Trevor Reed represents the East-King sub area on Sound Transit’s Community Oversight Panel and is founder of Transportation Reform. He completed his Master’s degree at University College London where he worked as a researcher at the Omega Center for Mega Infrastructure and Development focusing on how governance structures impact the efficient delivery of transit projects internationally. His work concerning traffic’s economic impacts has appeared nationally in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and PBS’s Nightly Business Report.

City Council, Density, legislature, Police, Transit

Friday Fizz: A Timid TOD Bill; Plus, More Committee Shakeups for the New City Council

1. Upzoning property adjacent to transit stations to promote walkability and maximize housing, AKA Transit Oriented Development (TOD), has become a basic tenet of sustainable city planning.

However, per Josh’s New Year’s prediction, state Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) proposed a TOD bill this week that allows cities to go small, with zoning requirements well below the standard for adding the number of units our housing-shy region needs. Reed’s bill sets the minimum allowable “Floor Area Ratio”—an equation that determines the amount of housing it’s possible to build on a lot—at 3.5 within a half-mile of a stop on a light rail and 2.5 within a quarter-mile of bus rapid transit lines.

An easy way to visualize this: Under a 3.5 FAR, you could have a 3.5 story building that completely covers one lot, or a seven-story building that covers half the lot. Since cities have all kinds of requirements for setbacks, landscaping, and maximum lot coverage, it typically takes a FAR of 4 or more to make a modest six-story apartment building feasible. Seattle, for example, uses a FAR of 4.5 to allow six-story apartments, and Redmond is already building six-story buildings adjacent to the coming light rail.

Last year’s more aggressive TOD proposal, which won support from a broad coalition, including the Housing Development Consortium, Futurewise, the Washington State Labor Council AFL-CIO, and Transportation Choices Coalition, went with a FAR of 4 in the station area and 6 around the station “hub,” a designation Reed’s bill doesn’t mention.

In other words, Reed’s bill is not an upzone for a city and region that’s currently in the process of building and planning the largest light rail expansion in the country. And it will allow cities that implement mass transit (like bus rapid transit) in the future to limit housing to densities far below what the Seattle region is already building.

By the way, Josh also predicted that this bill would come with “steep affordability requirements that will chill development.” Et voilà: Reed’s bill would require every new building in a station area to include 10 percent of units affordable to people making 60 percent or less of the area median income, a requirement that goes well beyond Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability law. It would also allow up to a 5 FAR for a building that’s 100 percent affordable.

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2. We reported earlier this week on the emerging shape of the new Seattle City Council, whose new president, Sara Nelson (citywide Position 9), wrote an op/ed in the Seattle Times this week laying out her priorities, including a vow to “break our reliance on new revenue (taxes) to pay our bills.” But council members also serve on a number of important regional committees, helping shape policy on homelessness, transportation, mental health care, and more. Here’s a summary of those regional assignments.

City Councilmember Dan Strauss (D6) will take over the seat formerly held by ex-city councilmember Debora Juarez on the Sound Transit Board, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced Friday afternoon. Juarez, who was council president, held the position for the past four years. Strauss was the vice-chair of the council’s transportation committee, but never led it. The council’s new transportation chair is Rob Saka (D1).

On the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) governing board, Nelson and new councilmember Cathy Moore (D5) will replace Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis. Nelson hasn’t weighed in that much on homelessness directly from the council dais (and wasn’t a member of the homelessness committee, which—along with the renters’ rights committee—no longer exists), but the brewery she owns, Fremont Brewing, uses illegally placed concrete “eco-blocks” to prevent homeless people from parking around its location off Leary Way. The company also worked actively to remove people living in tents on a piece of city-owned land immediately adjacent to its production facility.

Nelson championed legislation empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people who use drugs in public spaces, who are mostly unhoused. (People who possess or use illegal drugs in their houses are not subject to the law).

Nelson has also expressed skepticism (verging on outright opposition) to harm-reduction approaches to drug use and homelessness, such as Let Everyone Advance With Dignity (LEAD), which diverts people from arrest and prosecution and does not make sobriety a condition for shelter. On that note: Kettle, who vowed to hire more police and end the culture of “permissiveness” toward drug use and crime in Seattle, will replace Lisa Herbold on the LEAD policy coordinating group, which oversees the program.

Joy Hollingsworth (D3), Kettle, and Nelson will take over on the King County Board of Health for Lisa Herbold, Tammy Morales, and Teresa Mosqueda. Mayor Bruce Harrell will serve as an alternate “representing the city council” on the health board—an unusual, and possibly unprecedented, comingling of the legislative and executive branches on a regional committee with influence over major decisions about public health.

The board of health makes policy recommendations relating to  mental health and addiction, as well as communicative diseases like COVID.

Teresa Mosqueda, who attended some meetings from home, chided Nelson last year when she made a point of noting that she was present at one particular meeting “in person”; in her op/ed, Nelson said “coming in to work in person” will help spark a “major reset in tone and direction at City Hall.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit

Transit, Transportation

Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm Is Leaving After 14 Months at Helm

Executive leadership | Sound Transit

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.

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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.