Welch: Sound Transit’s $34 billion shell game: It’s time to stop the train

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Sound Transit’s board just voted 16-2 to keep the Everett Link Extension on schedule. Cue the press releases. Cue Everett’s mayor talking about ‘shared prosperity’ and ‘transformational change.’

Now cue the question nobody on that board answered: how do you close a $34.5 billion hole without telling the people who dug it that the shovel is still running?

The answer, apparently, is to sacrifice someone else’s project. Ballard gets delayed with no opening date in sight. The Issaquah line gets pushed to 2050. The Sounder N Line north of Seattle gets canceled by 2033, saving $400 million on a service that was moving 565 people a day in April. That last number deserves a moment of silence. Five hundred sixty-five daily riders on a commuter rail line serving one of the fastest-growing corridors in the Pacific Northwest. That’s not a transit success story. That’s a cautionary tale that got canceled before anyone had to write the ending.

Snohomish County gets to call this a win because Everett didn’t get cut. Fine. But let’s be honest about what winning looks like here. The original cost estimate for the Everett extension was $6.5 billion. It’s now $7.7 billion and climbing, with a first phase opening to Paine Field targeted for 2037 and downtown Everett not until 2041. That’s fifteen years from now. The board is asking residents to trust an agency that just admitted it underestimated its total program by $34.5 billion, and to believe the Everett numbers are solid.

They are not solid. They never are. That’s the pattern.

The shortfall didn’t materialize from nowhere. Inflation, labor costs, right-of-way acquisition, supply chain problems: all real, all predictable in their unpredictability, and none of them were honestly accounted for when Sound Transit put ST3 on the 2016 ballot with a $54 billion price tag and a 2041 completion promise. The Ballard extension alone has nearly doubled in projected cost, from $12 billion to as much as $22.6 billion. When a single line doubles in cost, that’s not bad luck. That’s a fundamental failure of project governance and fiscal honesty with the public.

Now let’s talk about who is paying for all of this, because Snohomish County residents are being hit from three directions simultaneously and most people don’t realize it.

Every time you buy something in the Sound Transit district, you pay a 1.4% sales and use tax on top of all other state and local sales taxes, plus a separate 0.8% rental car sales tax if you rent a vehicle. When you renew your car tabs, you pay an MVET of 1.1% annually on the depreciated value of your vehicle, which works out to $110 for every $10,000 of assessed value. That means a Snohomish County resident driving a vehicle with a depreciated value of $30,000 is paying $330 a year in Sound Transit car tabs alone, on top of all other registration fees. And Sound Transit continues using a 1999 depreciation schedule rather than the more favorable 2006 schedule, which means newer vehicles are taxed at a higher effective rate than they would be under current law. That doesn’t change until 2028.

Then there’s the property tax. The Sound Transit board just approved a 1% property tax increase for 2026, raising its levy from $176.2 million to $183 million across the district. Critically, Sound Transit can raise property taxes without a voter approval vote because the statutory 1% annual increase authority was baked into the original 2016 ST3 ballot measure. There was no discussion among board members before the vote. It passed 15-0. At the maximum allowable rate of 25 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, the average Snohomish County homeowner would pay $187 annually in Sound Transit property taxes alone. The 2026 rate sits at 16 cents per $1,000, but the agency has room to keep raising it and has every financial incentive to do so.

Add it up for a typical Snohomish County household: hundreds of dollars a year in sales tax contributions, $200 to $400 in car tab fees depending on your vehicle, and $100 to $187 in property taxes. All of it going to a system that won’t reach Everett until 2041 at the earliest, that the PSRC projects will carry just 3% of daily regional trips by 2050, and that is currently $34.5 billion over its original cost estimate.

The board’s response to that shortfall is to extend construction timelines to 2052, pursue 75-year bond authority that loads the debt onto people who weren’t old enough to vote in 2016, and move forward without an honest accounting of what this system will actually deliver.

So let’s do that accounting ourselves.

The Puget Sound Regional Council is the federally mandated planning body for this region. It’s not a think tank with an agenda. It’s the official agency responsible for regional transportation planning. According to PSRC’s own 2050 Transportation Plan, even with full ST3 buildout, light rail will carry just 3% of all daily trips in the region by 2050. Today that number is less than 1%. We are spending generational wealth, taking on 75-year debt, canceling commuter rail, delaying entire corridors, and asking Snohomish County residents to wait until 2041 to move the needle from under 1% to 3%.

That is the return on investment. Three percent.

The region has changed dramatically since 2016 and the assumptions driving this project have not kept pace. Remote work shifted commute patterns in ways that are structural, not temporary. Job growth dispersed across the suburbs. Population is surging in corridors the spine will never reach. A fixed rail system designed around 2016 commute patterns is being built to serve a 2016 version of this region that no longer exists.

And yet the board voted to keep moving. One member said during the six-hour meeting, ‘the math doesn’t work today, but we’ll make it work.’ That is not a fiscal strategy. That is a wish. Taxpayers in Snohomish County, King County, and Pierce County are being asked to fund a wish on a 75-year credit card with no honest reckoning of what alternatives might actually serve this region better.

There are alternatives. Bus rapid transit is faster to deploy, cheaper per mile, and flexible enough to follow where growth actually goes. It doesn’t generate the ribbon-cutting photos or the architecture renderings. But it moves people, and it doesn’t require betting the region’s fiscal future on cost projections that have already proven catastrophically wrong once.

The sunk cost argument will come. It always does. Too much is committed to stop now. But sunk costs are sunk. The question is what the next dollar buys, and right now the next dollar is buying a fixed system built for a commuting world that existed a decade ago, projected to serve 3% of daily trips thirty years from now.

At minimum, voters deserve a reauthorization vote. Not a board resolution. Not an internal survey designed to confirm what the agency already decided. A real ballot measure with current costs, current ridership projections, and an honest side-by-side comparison of what else these billions could build. The people who approved ST3 approved a specific plan at a specific cost with a specific timeline. None of those three things are true anymore.

If Sound Transit’s plan is still the right answer, make the case. Show the current numbers. Put it on the ballot and let the public decide with accurate information.

If the board won’t do that, the question answers itself.

Todd Welch is a Herald columnist covering local and state issues.