Flanked by over a dozen coun­ty and city lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing Seat­tle, the East­side, and the South Sound, King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Dow Con­stan­tine announced this after­noon that vot­ers from Vashon to Sno­qualmie will get the oppor­tu­ni­ty this spring to decide whether to raise rev­enue to pre­vent dra­con­ian ser­vice cuts to Metro and address an increas­ing­ly dan­ger­ous road main­te­nance backlog.

Con­stan­tine and the King Coun­ty Coun­cil intend to use exist­ing statu­to­ry author­i­ty to form a Trans­porta­tion Ben­e­fit Dis­trict (TBD) and place before vot­ers a pack­age that would raise around $130 mil­lion a year for Metro Tran­sit and coun­ty roads. Vot­ers will be asked in an April spe­cial elec­tion to approve a $60 vehi­cle fee and a one tenth of one per­cent increase in the sales tax.

The cost to the aver­age King Coun­ty house­hold would be around $11 a month.

Six­ty per­cent of the rev­enue would go to Metro to pre­vent exist­ing routes and ser­vice from being gut­ted, and the remain­ing forty per­cent would go to the coun­ty’s belea­guered and bad­ly under­fund­ed road ser­vices division.

Coun­ty and city lead­ers have been lob­by­ing the Leg­is­la­ture for years to pass a new trans­porta­tion pack­age to address the region’s needs, but a first attempt did not come until last year, when the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives advanced and sub­se­quent­ly approved a roads-friend­ly pack­age on a most­ly par­ty-line vote.

The Sen­ate did not take up the House­’s pack­age, nor it did it pro­duce its own leg­is­la­tion dur­ing the reg­u­lar ses­sion or the three spe­cial ses­sions that fol­lowed. When the House­’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship asked Sen­ate Repub­li­cans if they would con­sid­er a stand­alone bill to give King Coun­ty the author­i­ty to levy a motor vehi­cle excise tax to raise mon­ey for Metro, Repub­li­cans said no.

Instead of pro­duc­ing leg­is­la­tion, the Repub­li­cans and Rod­ney Tom pledged to hold an autumn “lis­ten­ing tour” to gath­er input from vot­ers. That, at least, they did.

At mul­ti­ple stops, includ­ing in Seat­tle and Belle­vue, they were loud­ly and unequiv­o­cal­ly prod­ded to act by their con­stituents. But sub­se­quent nego­ti­a­tions with the House and Gov­er­nor Inslee went nowhere, because of their ridicu­lous demands. As a result, it looks like there will be no statewide trans­porta­tion pack­age at all… at least not until after the midterm elections.

King Coun­ty lead­ers say they are done wait­ing. They’re tired of the dys­func­tion and dither­ing in the Sen­ate that has become a hall­mark of the Rod­ney Tom error.

They’ve had enough.

“King Coun­ty has stepped up to every chal­lenge set before us,” Exec­u­tive Con­stan­tine told a packed con­fer­ence room at Metro head­quar­ters. “We’ve done every­thing with­in our means to keep peo­ple mov­ing. We are out of time for a statewide solu­tion that includes a local option. We must move for­ward on our own.”

Rod­ney Tom, Cur­tis King, and oth­er Repub­li­can sen­a­tors have admit­ted that they oppose sim­ply giv­ing King Coun­ty new rev­enue author­i­ty because they don’t want the coun­ty to act on its own. Their strat­e­gy has been (and remains) to hold Metro and its rid­ers hostage to their road war­rior agen­da because their own con­stituen­cy is anti-tax. As Con­stan­tine not­ed, “They want to keep us hun­gry to pass a statewide trans­porta­tion pack­age.” His patience has run out, and so has ours.

King Coun­ty lead­ers would pre­fer to adopt or put before vot­ers a local motor vehi­cle excise tax to fund Metro and road repairs. But since it does­n’t look like the Leg­is­la­ture will give them the author­i­ty they’ve long been ask­ing for, they’re mov­ing for­ward with plans to cre­ate a Trans­porta­tion Ben­e­fit Dis­trict. In addi­tion to the vehi­cle fee and sales tax increase, they’re also plan­ning on rais­ing fares.

Antic­i­pat­ing that an increase in fares, the sales tax, and vehi­cle fees will most impact those with the least, coun­ty lead­ers have come up with a real­ly smart idea: Cre­ate a dis­count­ed fare of $1.50 for those who make less than 200% of the fed­er­al pover­ty lev­el. Youth, seniors, and stu­dents are already eli­gi­ble for reduced fares, but there is no dis­count for low income families.

“Mak­ing tran­sit more afford­able for work­ing peo­ple is both inno­v­a­tive and the right thing to do. A reduced fare will help tens of thou­sands of our neigh­bors get to work and school, and I urge the coun­ty coun­cil to take swift and pos­i­tive action to enact this pro­pos­al,” said Ali­son Eisinger, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Seattle/King Coun­ty Coali­tion on Home­less­ness, who spoke fol­low­ing Con­stan­ti­ne’s presentation.

It appears that Con­stan­tine already has six of the nine votes he needs to put the Move King Coun­ty Now pro­pos­al on the bal­lot in April.

Four of the Coun­cil’s five Democ­rats appeared at today’s news con­fer­ence (Lar­ry Phillips, Lar­ry Gos­sett, Joe McDer­mott, and Rod Dem­bows­ki). The fifth, Dave Upthe­grove, will also be an aye vote. In addi­tion, Repub­li­can Jane Hague was at today’s news con­fer­ence and pub­licly backed the mea­sure. That’s six aye votes.

There are three oth­er Repub­li­can mem­bers of the King Coun­ty Coun­cil: Rea­gan Dunn, Pete von Reich­bauer, and Kathy Lam­bert. Of the three, Lam­bert is per­haps the most like­ly to join Hague in vot­ing aye. But regard­less of how they vote, this pro­pos­al is bound to end up in front of the peo­ple of King County.

Lead­ers from King Coun­ty’s many cities were also well-rep­re­sent­ed at today’s event, includ­ing the may­ors of Red­mond (John Mar­chione, also the new chair of the Sound Cities Asso­ci­a­tion), Belle­vue (Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci), and Auburn (Nan­cy Backus).

Seat­tle City Coun­cilmem­ber Tom Ras­mussen rep­re­sent­ed the Emer­ald City.

“We have done every­thing pos­si­ble to con­vince our state leg­is­la­ture to pass a trans­porta­tion pack­age and they have failed to act,” Ras­mussen said. “We, as local lead­ers, are unit­ed in pre­vent­ing Metro bus ser­vice cuts, and in pre­vent­ing fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion of our roads and bridges. We must act now to have the tran­sit ser­vice and trans­porta­tion sys­tem that is crit­i­cal to our region’s pros­per­i­ty and livability.