Tag: Sound Transit 3

Guest Contributor, Transit

How We Can Save Ballard Light Rail

By Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss

Ballard Light Rail is facing its biggest threat yet. Despite the fact the Ballard Link Extension is projected to serve as many as 148,000 people daily, the most riders of any project in Sound Transit history, the agency is considering postponing the project indefinitely to address its long-term budget issues.

That’s unacceptable. As a Sound Transit board member, I am proposing amendments to get the Ballard Link Extension back on track. They raise the question: Are we going to do everything we can to get this project done, or are we going to make this decision without exploring every option?

Since Sound Transit 3 (ST3) passed in 2016 with the promise to bring light rail to Ballard, we have planned the growth of our city around it. In that decade, Ballard has grown from being just one of Seattle’s many neighborhoods to an officially designated regional center, meaning it is zoned for the highest density of job and housing growth.

Now, under Sound Transit’s current proposal, construction of the so-called Ballard Link Extension would only be funded to Seattle Center. That’s nowhere near Ballard.

So, has Ballard Light Rail reached the end of the line? That would be a generational mistake that we can’t afford to make. Here are some of the solutions I will be proposing to the Sound Transit Board.

First, build a Ballard Starter Line.

One of the key ways Sound Transit’s plan falls short is by prioritizing nearly $11 billion in Seattle-area funding to build a second downtown tunnel over building light rail to Ballard. That’s a policy choice, not a necessity.

That second tunnel would run parallel to the current tunnel and serve roughly the same area. To maximize ridership, we should move Seattle’s funding from the second downtown tunnel to where it’s needed most—building a Westlake to Ballard Starter Line and reaching new light rail riders.

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The second tunnel could then be funded through future revenue and cost-saving strategies identified through Sound Transit’s ongoing Enterprise Initiative. The initiative has already delivered on once-delayed promises to Tacoma and Everett to finish the central “spine” of our light rail system. My amendment would not impact those or any other extension projects. It simply moves Seattle area funding within Seattle.

The second downtown tunnel is important. We need to build it. But it can’t come at the cost of building rail to Ballard.

The biggest challenge to my Westlake to Ballard Starter Line proposal is Sound Transit’s ability to answer valid questions about the impacts of the proposal with certainty before the vote. These questions can be answered but require more time. We should take that time and give this critical decision the consideration it deserves.

Second, we can improve the way we finance light rail.

By improving how Sound Transit finances light rail, we can deliver every project faster without raising taxes. Sound Transit currently only uses 30 percent of its legal debt capacity. Making some limited, commonsense adjustments to this policy would make a huge difference.

It’s not just me advocating for this. Issaquah Mayor Mark Mullet has pushed for this strategy to deliver projects sooner, before inflation drives the costs even higher.

We must also make our case with legislators in Olympia to allow Sound Transit to take longer-term bonds. While 75-year bonds may not be smart for most projects, they are a helpful tool financing infrastructure that outlasts the life of the bond—like the second downtown tunnel.

That’s not to mention the efficiencies we must put in place to rein in Sound Transit’s spending. Transit systems across the globe build and operate light rail at a lower cost. We need to use their best practices.

This month, I hosted a town hall. More than 200 community members showed up to support the Ballard Light Rail extension. I was struck by how many older people told me they voted for ST3 for their grandkids, even though they may never see the Ballard Link completed. That made it so much more heartbreaking to hear from many of those grandkids, now in their 20s, wondering whether Ballard would get light rail in their lifetimes.

It’s time for us to keep our promises. It’s time for us to build Ballard light rail.

Sound Transit’s plan and my proposed amendments are on the agenda for the next Board of Directors Meeting on May 28 at 1:30 PM. Community members are encouraged to participate and can find more information on Sound Transit’s .

Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss represents District 6, including Magnolia, Ballard, Phinney Ridge, Green Lake, Greenwood, Fremont and many other microneighborhoods. He also serves as a Sound Transit Board Member.

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.