King County voters turn down Proposition 1; Metro service remans in jeopardy

Well, the ini­tial batch of returns for the April 22nd spe­cial elec­tion just got report­ed by King Coun­ty Elec­tions, and they aren’t pret­ty. By a vote of 55% to 44%, vot­ers are reject­ing Propo­si­tion 1, the mea­sure unan­i­mous­ly referred to the bal­lot by the King Coun­ty Coun­cil to save Metro and fund bad­ly need­ed road repairs.

The ini­tial tal­ly report­ed by King Coun­ty Elec­tions con­sists of 162,508 votes for Propo­si­tion 1, and 200,887 votes against. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of bal­lots remain to be count­ed, and it is cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble that the mar­gin will tight­en. But it would take a huge turn­around in the late votes to change the out­come, and there just aren’t enough votes wait­ing to be count­ed to over­come the opposition.

Propo­si­tion 1’s appar­ent fail­ure leaves over sev­en­ty of Metro’s routes on the chop­ping block, and leaves sev­er­al dozen more fac­ing dras­tic ser­vice cutbacks.

King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Dow Con­stan­tine, address­ing mem­bers of the Move King Coun­ty Now coali­tion at Kells Irish Pub and Restau­rant in Seat­tle, not­ed that the num­bers did not look good, but he vowed to con­tin­ue work­ing to pro­tect Metro, even as he pro­pos­es leg­is­la­tion to elim­i­nate routes and evis­cer­ate others.

“The vot­ers are not reject­ing Metro,” Con­stan­tine said. “They are reject­ing this par­tic­u­lar means of fund­ing Metro. We know the peo­ple of King Coun­ty love and val­ue their tran­sit ser­vice. They vote with their feet and with their ORCA cards.”

Propo­si­tion 1’s fail­ure will also leave the King Coun­ty Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion’s Road Ser­vices Divi­sion woe­ful­ly under­fund­ed. KCDOT’s shrink­ing bud­get has begun to take a seri­ous toll on road main­te­nance, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al areas.

King Coun­ty Coun­cilmem­ber Lar­ry Phillips and Seat­tle May­or Ed Mur­ray, who spoke after Con­stan­tine, both stressed that they have been around long enough to know that the fail­ure of one par­tic­u­lar bal­lot mea­sure is hard­ly the end of the road.

They make a very good point.

In 2007, vot­ers in King Coun­ty over­whelm­ing­ly reject­ed the Roads & Tran­sit bal­lot mea­sure, which would have increased the sales tax and vehi­cle fees to pay for road projects and expan­sion of Sound Tran­sit’s Link light rail system.

But the fol­low­ing year, Sound Tran­sit went back to the bal­lot on its own. It resound­ing­ly won approval to extend light rail south, east, and north, towards Fed­er­al Way, Red­mond, and Lyn­nwood from the vot­ers of urban Puget Sound.

Going to the bal­lot in April was always risky, but King Coun­ty lead­ers, left emp­ty hand­ed after the Leg­is­la­ture failed to agree on a trans­porta­tion pack­age, con­clud­ed that the peo­ple of King Coun­ty deserved the oppor­tu­ni­ty to weigh in before cuts were imple­ment­ed… and so they referred to the bal­lot a plan to save Metro and fix coun­ty roads. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, those vot­ers who chose to par­tic­i­pate in the spe­cial elec­tion did­n’t like the plan. And so we’re back where we started.

Any­one who believes that Metro’s pro­posed cuts are just a bluff, and vot­ed no think­ing that Metro will fig­ure out how to save routes from elim­i­na­tion with­out new rev­enue, is in for a very rude awakening.

Metro is actu­al­ly about to lose a lot of rev­enue… the $20 vehi­cle fee the King Coun­ty Coun­cil enact­ed in 2011 to stave off ser­vice cuts is about to expire. When it does, Metro will once again be dan­ger­ous­ly depen­dent on the volatile sales tax.