Seattle Press on Line - Sound Transit's Betrayals

There From Here

Sound Transit's Betrayals

By Tara Peattie

Oct 11, 2001 -- After the Sound Transit Board's vote a couple weeks ago to build Link light rail south, opposition rumblings hit a low roar. A guest columnist in one of the daily papers said that Rainier Valley residents would be justified in marching with torches and pitchforks to the Sound Transit Board. Kris Wilder, a Seattleite who ran Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, filed a statewide initiative to enable voters to disband Sound Transit. There have been attempts to put together city and county-wide initiatives, all with legal problems because of Sound Transit's authority over a zone that encompasses three counties.

I am one of the 56 percent who voted for Sound Move in 1996, who now considers showing up, pitchfork in hand, with the rest of the mob at Sound Transit's doorstep. Why is there so much bitterness? The answers are money, and betrayal.

Say you earn, as is the national average, $40,000 a year, and for argument's sake, you spend $10,000 annually on sales taxable items. At a taking of .4 percent of our sales tax, Sound Transit has collected $2000 from you over the last five years (not counting interest). There is no cap on how long Sound Transit will collect money from you and I, and Sound Transit has not done a lick for Seattle.

We were promised a 21-mile system from SeaTac to the University District, for $1.8 billion, by 2006. We were promised congestion relief (not sinus, but streets) and rapid, regional transit. We were promised conservative funding assumptions. What we got were cost estimates criticized from the beginning as disingenuously low, that ballooned over-budget by a billion dollars before a spade of dirt has been turned. We were promised a complete and operational system within 10 years.

We don't ask for the world and we know that there is no one-shot cure-all for congestion, but we know too that making promises you can't keep is cynical and manipulative. It amounts to betrayal of the voters.

The current plan is for a 14-mile "starter" rail system to substitute for what we voted for in 1996. It reaches from the Convention Center to one mile north of the airport. This we can afford, we are told. But can we? Can we afford to tear up existing systems that work, such as Rainier Valley and the downtown bus tunnel, for something that does not do what was promised?

Grant Cogswell, community activist, writer, Link critic and original co-author of monorail initiative I-41, is running for City Council against Sound Transit Board member and City Council Transportation Chair Richard McIver. "Sound Transit's ultimate betrayal is starting on a system that has absolutely no hope of extending to the region," states Cogswell. "They promised us regional solutions."

Even Paul Schell, long a supporter of Link, cast his Sound Transit Board vote against the latest plan, reasoning that it doesn't make sense to not reach the airport, and that "monorail, a possibly cheaper, better technology, should be explored."

In 1996, the voters approved a contract. In voting for the starter segment, the Sound Transit Board has left us without a contract. We just have to trust, and pay by the hour. Sound Transit's regional mission has been hijacked. One need only drive the current route through Rainier Valley to understand that this project is a gift to future developers, not to current Seattle taxpayers. With 300 property takings and years of construction, there will be plenty of turnover from the small businesses that presently dot Martin Luther King, Jr. Way to developers with far greater reserves.

And it gets worse. If light rail were the only option to help with our traffic mess, we could say, "Get your financial house in order and soldier on, guys." But there are other options! Such as, you guessed it, more buses, and of course, MONORAIL! Which brings us to Sound Transit's next betrayal.

Sound Transit is charged with the task of doing a study of technologies for Phase II, which currently means ways to get north of downtown, and to the Eastside. The study was due out last year. Then late August, then September. Where is it? Sound Transit Director Joni Earl told an inquirer in September that she would look into it, and has not as of deadline responded. Why is this study taking so long? My guess is that, like the Mayor's study, Sound Transit has concluded or will conclude that elevated is a good (and maybe the only) option for going north, and there is no hurry to release such an item until they have secured financing from the feds to build surface light rail south. Thus the choice for the first segment is not called into question, and the choice for the second segment is weighted to what is already getting built.

Like a suitor who's broken a few too many promises and is about to be shown the door, there's always the need to come back with the same ol' tired lines. It's time to get started baby. We've been talking for 30 years. You gotta trust me this time. Remember way back when you voted for me? You used to believe.

Remember, it's election time. Time to check who's asleep at the wheel, and who's looking out for you baby?

Tara Peattie does not actually own a pitchfork. She can be reached at peattie@drizzle.com.

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