Senate Republicans advance new scheme to mess with Sound Transit’s governance

Pick­ing up where Mary Mar­garet Hau­gen and Ed Mur­ray once left off, Repub­li­cans on the Sen­ate Trans­porta­tion Com­mit­tee vot­ed today to advance a bill that would wipe out Sound Tran­sit’s fed­er­at­ed board of city and coun­ty lead­er­ship and replace it with a pan­el of trans­porta­tion czars elect­ed from eleven new­ly drawn trans­porta­tion dis­tricts in King, Pierce, and Sno­homish counties.

Sub­sti­tute Sen­ate Bill 5001 moved out of the Sen­ate Trans­porta­tion Com­mit­tee today with sup­port from all of the pan­el’s Repub­li­can mem­bers, plus Democ­rats Steve Hobbs and Kevin Van De Wege. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Marko Liias, Annette Cleve­land, Rebec­ca Sal­daña, and Dean Takko vot­ed against mov­ing the bill.

SSB 5001 is the lat­est in a long series of failed attempts by the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate to shred the gov­er­nance struc­ture for Sound Tran­sit that the Leg­is­la­ture orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed in the 1990s. A decade has now tran­spired since NPI first took up the cause of fight­ing these coun­ter­pro­duc­tive proposals.

In that time, Sound Tran­sit has opened and thrice expand­ed its first light rail line, expand­ed Sounder com­muter rail, expand­ed ST Express bus ser­vice, and twice won approval from region­al vot­ers to keep on expand­ing ser­vice in all direc­tions. Rid­er­ship across the sys­tem is boom­ing, and Sound Tran­sit has kept on rolling, deliv­er­ing projects at a brisk and steady pace.

Sen­ate Repub­li­cans don’t like that and have this ridicu­lous, per­verse desire to mess with suc­cess. Sound Tran­sit is rolling along and they want to derail its progress.

Pri­or to this year’s leg­isla­tive ses­sion, Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Steve O’Ban (R‑28th Dis­trict; Lake­wood, Uni­ver­si­ty Place, Taco­ma) served notice that he would be bring­ing a bill to dis­solve the Sound Tran­sit board and replace it with a pan­el of trans­porta­tion czars elect­ed from a set of new­ly drawn dis­tricts that no one would be able to keep track of (except, of course, for the cam­paign con­sul­tants whose job it would be to get peo­ple elect­ed in those districts).

O’Ban’s Sen­ate Bill 5001 under­went some mod­i­fi­ca­tions when it was replaced with a sub­sti­tute in com­mit­tee, but it’s basi­cal­ly the same awful bill.

Ahead of the vote, NPI sent a mes­sage to all of the mem­bers of the Sen­ate Trans­porta­tion Com­mit­tee ask­ing that O’Ban’s 5001 be aban­doned and that the com­mit­teemem­bers turn their atten­tion to more pro­duc­tive tasks. We even gave an exam­ple of how the Leg­is­la­ture could be of service:

We ask that as leg­is­la­tors with a focus on trans­porta­tion, you direct your ener­gies to sup­port­ing the work vot­ers have autho­rized Sound Tran­sit to do instead of mess­ing with how ST is governed.

Sound Tran­sit 3 (ST3) will be even more ben­e­fi­cial if we can accel­er­ate the timetable for the deliv­ery of projects, and add val­ue by extend­ing projects fur­ther with some state funding.

For exam­ple, we’re going to be spend­ing quite a bit of mon­ey to bring Sounder south to DuPont. That invest­ment will make even more sense if Sound Tran­sit were per­mit­ted to expand Sounder ser­vice all the way to Olympia in a part­ner­ship with WSDOT and Inter­ci­ty Transit.

Olympia is not that much fur­ther than DuPont, but it’s out­side of ST’s ser­vice area. The Leg­is­la­ture should offer to help make Sounder to Olympia a real­i­ty by pass­ing leg­is­la­tion to enable the nec­es­sary, long-term inter­local cooperation.

Imag­ine being able to com­mute to Olympia by train in the future from King and Pierce coun­ties, bypass­ing that hor­ri­ble JBLM traf­fic and being able to step off the train in down­town Olympia and catch a Dash shut­tle to the cam­pus. Would­n’t that be great? Explor­ing what’s nec­es­sary to make that future a real­i­ty is what you should be be spend­ing your time on, not this legislation.

Sad­ly, a major­i­ty of the mem­bers of the com­mit­tee did not heed our request. We will there­fore step up our efforts to ensure that SSB 5001 is defeated.

It is impor­tant to under­stand that the orga­ni­za­tions push­ing for this bill, like the Wash­ing­ton Pol­i­cy Cen­ter, are on a long-term mis­sion to under­mine and destroy Sound Tran­sit. They are not moti­vat­ed by a desire to make tran­sit work better.

Sound Tran­sit is fund­ed by mul­ti­ple vot­er-approved rev­enue streams, and ide­o­log­i­cal, anti-rail right wing Repub­li­cans are des­per­ate to get their hands on that mon­ey. They’d like to redi­rect as much of it as pos­si­ble into roads — or, at least, in the words of John Carl­son — “rub­ber tire” tran­sit, which has to oper­ate on roads.

Wip­ing out Sound Tran­sit’s fed­er­at­ed board and man­dat­ing that its replace­ment be a pan­el of trans­porta­tion czars from nine­teen sep­a­rate dis­tricts would give them a decent chance of tak­ing con­trol of the agency, its projects, and its revenue.

A major­i­ty of the eleven dis­tricts the revised bill calls for (the orig­i­nal bill spec­i­fied nine­teen) would con­ceiv­ably con­sist of turf either very friend­ly to right wing can­di­dates, or at least winnable by right wing candidates.

The fed­er­at­ed board Sound Tran­sit has now is essen­tial­ly invul­ner­a­ble to a Kem­per Free­man Jr.-funded hos­tile takeover, because its mem­bers are appoint­ed by the coun­ty exec­u­tives of King, Sno­homish, and Pierce coun­ties, who are also them­selves mem­bers, along with the chief­tain of WSDOT (cur­rent­ly Roger Millar).

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has been suc­cess­ful in keep­ing the exec­u­tives of King and Sno­homish coun­ties in Demo­c­ra­t­ic, pro-tran­sit hands for many con­sec­u­tive elec­tion cycles. Repub­li­cans have done bet­ter in Pierce Coun­ty, and now have one of their own as Pierce Coun­ty Exec­u­tive, but he is just one board mem­ber out of eighteen.

When O’Ban and oth­ers talk about the need for Sound Tran­sit to have a “direct­ly elect­ed” board, they’re being disingenuous.

Except for Mil­lar, ST’s board is already direct­ly elect­ed. Its oth­er sev­en­teen mem­bers are all may­ors, coun­ty exec­u­tives, and city or coun­cil coun­cilmem­bers.… peo­ple that we in Puget Sound elect­ed to make impor­tant deci­sions about land use, stormwa­ter runoff, and yes, transportation.

Sound Tran­sit would have a tough time deliv­er­ing projects smooth­ly with­out the coop­er­a­tion of city and coun­ty gov­ern­ments. It there­fore makes per­fect sense that ST is gov­erned by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of its city and coun­ty partners.

After a rocky start, Sound Tran­sit is now doing very well. It has expe­ri­enced lead­er­ship and sound gov­er­nance. Its pub­lic approval rat­ings are high­er than WSDOT’s. The fed­er­at­ed board mod­el the Leg­is­la­ture orig­i­nal­ly came up with for Sound Tran­sit clear­ly works. There is no need to dis­card it.

Wash­ing­ton already has thou­sands upon thou­sands spe­cial dis­tricts that most vot­ers can­not keep track of. Fire dis­tricts, hos­pi­tal dis­tricts, water dis­tricts, sew­er dis­tricts, even ceme­tery dis­tricts… we’ve got a pletho­ra of each. That’s on top of our city gov­ern­ments, coun­ty gov­ern­ments, school dis­tricts, and ports, which all oper­ate below the state and fed­er­al governments.

Repub­li­cans are con­stant­ly say­ing that we need less gov­ern­ment, but as we have seen, their actions belie their words. They are not for small­er gov­ern­ment at all. In fact, it is big gov­ern­ment that they like, as was proved dur­ing the Bush error, and will be proved again over the course of the next few years.

How many times have you heard a promi­nent Repub­li­can say we should slash fund­ing for the Depart­ment of Defense, or the FBI, or the NSA, or the Secret Ser­vice, or the DEA? It’s rare. Plen­ty of Repub­li­cans are for gut­ting pub­lic agen­cies and depart­ments that were formed using the log­ic of pro­gres­sive val­ues, like the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. But very few want to take an axe to the defense bud­get and reform pro­cure­ment or elim­i­nate waste­ful contracts.

Sim­i­lar­ly, at the state lev­el, you won’t hear Repub­li­cans say we should stop putting mon­ey into high­ways or pris­ons. You will hear Repub­li­cans grum­ble end­less­ly about Sound Tran­sit and its “choo choo trains”. It does­n’t mat­ter to them that Sound Tran­sit went out and won vot­er approval for its projects and financ­ing mix. Repub­li­cans resent that Wash­ing­ton State is invest­ing heav­i­ly in light rail, and they’d like to pull the plug on that before the sys­tems are built out.

This bill would cre­ate more gov­ern­ment, but that’s not a prob­lem for Sen­ate Repub­li­cans, because once set up, they’d have a chance of con­trol­ling it. Nev­er mind that it does­n’t com­port with their stat­ed prin­ci­ples. It is polit­i­cal pow­er they desire, and this bill is a vehi­cle for allow­ing them to get what they want.

We can’t let them win. A soci­ety in which peo­ple are forced to dri­ve to get where they want to go is not a free soci­ety. Mobil­i­ty mat­ters. The region­al tran­sit net­work Sound Tran­sit is build­ing, with a rail spine at its core, is vital to the future health and pros­per­i­ty of our region. The Leg­is­la­ture gave Sound Tran­sit life over twen­ty years ago; now, it must allow ST to car­ry out its vot­er-approved work.

If the Leg­is­la­ture desires to be help­ful, that is wel­come. Nefar­i­ous attempts to sab­o­tage Sound Tran­sit’s work such as SSB 5001 are not help­ful and not welcome.

There’s a legit­i­mate argu­ment to be made that Puget Sound would ben­e­fit from hav­ing its own equiv­a­lent of TriMet (which pro­vides ser­vice to greater Port­land, Ore­gon) as opposed to four local tran­sit agen­cies and one region­al tran­sit agency.

There is actu­al­ly less dupli­ca­tion now than peo­ple think, because ST’s ser­vices are all oper­at­ed by part­ners. King Coun­ty Metro oper­ates Cen­tral Link light rail, for instance, and Burling­ton North­ern San­ta Fe oper­ates Sounder. ST Express bus­es are oper­at­ed by Metro, Com­mu­ni­ty Tran­sit, and Pierce Tran­sit. Sound Tran­sit pri­mar­i­ly exists to plan and build tran­sit ser­vice that links the region together.

At some point down the line, it may make sense to uni­fy our tran­sit agen­cies. But we are not at that point now. Such a dis­cus­sion will be more appro­pri­ate years from now when the region­al sys­tem we’ve vot­ed for is built out. As we learned from the merg­er of Metro and King Coun­ty, such moves are very, very dif­fi­cult to smooth­ly orches­trate. Sound Tran­sit’s impor­tant, vot­er approved work deserves to be sup­port­ed, not sab­o­taged. SSB 5001 can and must be defeated.