It’s time to write Congress about stopping light rail. The Federal Transit Administration has rated Sound Transit’s light-rail line as one of the two best projects out of 77 proposals nationwide and called for as much as $409 million for the project.
Stopping it will require our writing to our senators and representatives.
They should know that light rail is a bad idea.
U.S. representatives Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, and Rick Larson, D-Lake Stevens, should know that the plan won’t help their districts, and U.S. senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell should know it won’t help their home areas. The FTA’s 2004 New Starts program boosted Seattle’s Central Link to “highly recommended” from its score of “recommended” a year earlier.
There’s a tendency to think of federal grants as free money, but we have to remember that it would come from a federal budget that is already in a deficit – a deficit that we will pass on to our children.
In addition, don’t federal officials know that I-776 was a negative vote on Sound Transit and that Seattle voters supported an alternative technology by adopting the monorail plan? And don’t they know that we have several organized opposition groups, calling for a revote and for looking at alternative technologies and routes?
President Bush’s budget includes $75 million for Sound Transit light rail, which officials say is a sign the federal government will contribute millions more to build the 14-mile line between Seattle’s Convention Place and Tukwila.
But that’s still no guarantee the transit agency will get the full $409 million commitment it says it needs to start construction later this year. And Congress must still decide whether to appropriate the $75 million proposed by the administration.
Before the $2.5 billion project can begin, Seattle light rail must get a favorable review by federal inspectors this spring before Congress holds hearings.
Opponents are pinning their hopes on the arrival of U.S. Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla., as chairman of the newly created transportation and treasury subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. In 1997, Istook rebuffed a request from his own state for $22 million in federal aid for a three-mile streetcar in Oklahoma City; he opted, instead, to help provide $3.6 million for buses.
He is well known as a budget hawk and a fiscal conservative, and he believes in large part that people who use services should have to pay for them.
Federal reviews are focusing primarily on whether Sound Transit has the financial wherewithal and the engineering expertise to complete the Seattle-Tukwila segment, rather than the broader controversy over whether light rail is the most efficient technology for the metro area.
Tim Eyman’s initiative is one way to stop light rail. Eyman’s latest may be our best available way to kill Sound Transit’s light-rail project, but there may be others.
The initiative would change the state law that created Sound Transit and prohibit the agency from building light rail. Unlike other Eyman initiatives, it wouldn’t take money from Sound Transit or any other agency. It would allow Sound Transit to spend its money for any other purposes.
“They can spend it on anything else,” Eyman has said, mentioning monorail as a possibility.
As an editorial here last week said it’s unfair for voters in all of the state’s 39 counties to set policy for the three-county Sound Transit district. That was my argument last fall in opposing Initiative 776; I didn’t think a statewide vote should take away vehicle excise-tax money duly appropriated by the Douglas County commissioners.
I would rather see a local vote on the issue. A bill in the Legislature would give Sound Transit an elected board – meaning it would be more likely to have varied points of view – and give voters in the district the powers of initiative, referendum and recall.
That, however, would come too late to force a revote on light rail.
So, I propose another plan: A King County initiative to either (a) disallow Sound Transit to spend money on light rail or (b) force a revote on the technology and/or route. This would work because the light-rail line is entirely within King County and it is paid for entirely by residents of Seattle, north King County and south King County.
Someone write the initiative and send me a copy to sign. Otherwise, count me as a reluctant supporter of the Eyman initiative.
Metropolitan King County Council member Cynthia Sullivan, a Sound Transit board member, predicted Eyman’s signature-gathering would have no effect on Sound Transit’s quest for federal money.
“We will have broken ground before this initiative probably even qualifies for the ballot,” Sullivan has said. “What are we supposed to do then?”
Sound Transit should wait and do nothing until we vote on an initiative.
Under Sound Transit’s policies, tax money it collects on the Eastside and in Snohomish and Pierce counties is spent only on transit projects in those areas.
We’d like to know what you think. If you have a comment send it to
The Enterprise
P.O. Box 977
Lynnwood, Wash. 98036
E-mail: entopinion@Heraldnet.com
Fax: 425-774-8622
Evan Smith is the Enterprise forum editor.
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