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Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

Washington State Senate approves new Republican scheme to sabotage Sound Transit

With the “aye” votes of four Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors, the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate this morn­ing passed a bill orig­i­nal­ly spon­sored by Repub­li­can Steve O’Ban that would wipe out Sound Tran­sit’s fed­er­at­ed board and replace it with a pan­el of trans­porta­tion czars hail­ing from eleven spe­cial­ly-drawn districts.

The roll call was as fol­lows:

Roll Call
SSB 5001
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
3/1/2017
Yeas: 29 Nays: 20

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tors Angel, Bai­ley, Baum­gart­ner, Beck­er, Braun, Brown, Con­way, Darneille, Erick­sen, Fain, For­tu­na­to, Hasegawa, Hawkins, Hon­ey­ford, King, Milos­cia, O‘Ban, Pad­den, Palum­bo, Pear­son, Rivers, Rossi, Schoesler, Shel­don, Short, Walsh, War­nick, Wil­son, Zeiger

Vot­ing Nay: Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Car­lyle, Chase, Cleve­land, Frockt, Hobbs, Hunt, Keis­er, Kud­er­er, Liias, McCoy, Mul­let, Nel­son, Ped­er­sen, Ranker, Rolfes, Sal­daña, Takko, Van De Wege, Wellman

Sen­ate Repub­li­cans had sig­naled recent­ly that they were going to make SSB 5001 a pri­or­i­ty bill, so today’s floor action was not unex­pect­ed. The bill passed out of com­mit­tee sev­er­al days ago with the help of Steve Hobbs and Kevin Van De Wege. Both of them vot­ed against the bill on final passage.

What was incred­i­bly dis­ap­point­ing was that four Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors who should have known bet­ter — Bob Hasegawa, Guy Palum­bo, Steve Con­way, and Jean­nie Darneille — vot­ed for SSB 5001.

In doing so, they betrayed Sound Tran­sit and the pro­gres­sive movement.

It is vital to under­stand that the pur­pose of this leg­is­la­tion is to give the right wing an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gain con­trol over Sound Tran­sit, its projects, and its rev­enue streams start­ing in 2018. The bill kills off the cur­rent Sound Tran­sit Board start­ing next year and requires that a set of eleven new dis­tricts no one will be able to keep track of be drawn for the pur­pos­es of elect­ing a pan­el of trans­porta­tion czars.

These czars would then assume con­trol over Sound Transit.

As struc­tured now, the Sound Tran­sit Board is invul­ner­a­ble to a Kem­per Free­man Jr.-funded hos­tile takeover. It has eigh­teen mem­bers, sev­en­teen of whom are local elect­ed offi­cials. These include the King, Pierce, and Sno­homish coun­ty exec­u­tives, and four­teen city/county coun­cilmem­bers or may­ors appoint­ed by the exec­u­tives. The eigh­teenth mem­ber is the Sec­re­tary of WSDOT.

This fed­er­at­ed board mod­el was actu­al­ly cre­at­ed by the Leg­is­la­ture back in the 1990s, and it’s work­ing just fine. There’s no rea­son to do away with it. Unless, of course, you’re an anti-rail Repub­li­can who wants to mount a hos­tile takeover of Sound Tran­sit with the aim of thwart­ing Link light rail from expanding.

We have defeat­ed bills like SSB 5001 before and we can do so again. But this is an all hands on deck sit­u­a­tion. Every activist and every orga­ni­za­tion who was involved in help­ing to pass Sound Tran­sit 3 last year needs to pitch in to ensure that this bill gets a bur­ial in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Written by Andrew Villeneuve :: 11:37 AM

Categories: Legislative Advocacy, Policy Topics, Public Planning

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9 Comments

  1. I can­not believe that 4 Wash­ing­ton state Sen­a­tors vot­ed for this!!!! We are watch­ing and you will be vot­ed out! We do not want any Repub­li­can agen­da!!! We need our Sound Transit!

    # by Robin Westbrook :: March 2nd, 2017 at 6:16 AM

  2. Won­der­ing why
    Bob hasegawa
    Guy palumbo
    Steve Conway
    Jean­nie Danielle
    Vot­ed against SSB5001???

    # by Kathryn Jarlov :: March 2nd, 2017 at 9:02 AM

  3. Why did Hasegawa vote for the Sen­ate bill? He’s usu­al­ly a very reli­able progressive. 

    I think that some pro­gres­sive lead­ers were not entire­ly pleased with ST3’s price tag.

    Is there any chance the House would approve the bill? I’d think not, but ya nev­er know — the House passed Steve Lit­zow’s char­ter school bill last session.

    # by Don Smith :: March 3rd, 2017 at 11:09 AM

  4. Wow, you real­ly aren’t pay­ing atten­tion, are you? As a fel­low Demo­c­rat, this is NOT a par­ti­san issue, no mat­ter how much you try to paint it as one. No one is say­ing we don’t need mass tran­sit just because we want elect­ed offi­cials man­ag­ing the largest tax we pay. What we want is a group that votes for the voice of the peo­ple, not just for a select few who live in down­town Seat­tle. We need to elim­i­nate the arro­gance and hubris of Peter Rogoff from a lead­er­ship posi­tion. He needs to be account­able to the peo­ple. Watch the video in this blog post and see how he address­es the 10 city may­ors in the room with a con­de­scend­ing tone toward tax­pay­ers..

    # by David Hablewitz :: March 3rd, 2017 at 1:37 PM

  5. Every issue is a par­ti­san issue, David. 

    Think about it: If there was no dis­agree­ment, there would­n’t be an issue. Human beings are sub­jec­tive. We have opin­ions. We’re biased. Those of us in pol­i­tics hold posi­tions backed by sin­cere­ly held val­ues, and we advo­cate for poli­cies root­ed in those val­ues. We’re all par­ti­sans, whether we belong to a polit­i­cal par­ty or not. 

    Par­ti­san [pahr-tuh-zuh n, ‑suh n; British pahr-tuh-zan]
    noun
    First def­i­n­i­tion: an adher­ent or sup­port­er of a per­son, group, par­ty, or cause, espe­cial­ly a per­son who shows a biased, emo­tion­al allegiance. 

    The cur­rent Sound Tran­sit Board is broad­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the region the agency serves. If you look at its mem­ber­ship, you can see there’s quite a bit of geo­graph­ic diver­si­ty. This is not a Seat­tle-cen­tric board.

    Dave Somers, Chair (Mon­roe)
    John Mar­chione, Vice Chair (Red­mond)
    Mar­i­lyn Strick­land, Vice Chair (Taco­ma)
    Nan­cy Backus (Auburn)
    Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci (Belle­vue)
    Fred But­ler (Issaquah)
    Dow Con­stan­tine (West Seattle)
    Bruce Dammeier (Puyallup)
    Dave Ear­ling (Edmonds)
    Rob John­son (Seat­tle)
    Kent Keel (Uni­ver­si­ty Place)
    Joe McDer­mott (West Seattle)
    Mary Moss (Lake­wood)
    Ed Mur­ray (Capi­tol Hill, Seattle)
    Paul Roberts (Everett)
    Dave Upthe­grove (Des Moines)
    Pete von Reich­bauer (Fed­er­al Way)
    Roger Mil­lar, WSDOT Sec­re­tary (Olympia)

    There are only four board­mem­bers from Seat­tle. Three-fourths of the board are from South King Coun­ty, the East­side, Sno­homish Coun­ty, or Pierce Coun­ty. So the argu­ment that we need to scrap the cur­rent board in order to get “a group that votes for the voice of the peo­ple, not just for a select few in down­town Seat­tle” is non­sense. The ST3 pack­age unan­i­mous­ly sub­mit­ted by the Sound Tran­sit Board last year won hand­i­ly. The major­i­ty of Sound Tran­sit’s vot­ers approve of its work. 

    The may­ors and coun­cilmem­bers who serve with the coun­ty exec­u­tives on the cur­rent ST board are strong advo­cates for the com­mu­ni­ties they come from. We see it in our inter­ac­tions with them. 

    And CEO Peter Rogoff is a thought­ful leader who val­ues pub­lic input and com­mu­ni­ty part­ner­ships. I dis­agree com­plete­ly with your char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of him. You’ve mis­judged a good man. 

    Take note that SSB 5001 does not pro­pose cre­at­ing an elect­ed exec­u­tive posi­tion to head Sound Tran­sit. Were SSB 5001 to be imple­ment­ed, the board would still hire and fire the CEO. The CEO would not answer direct­ly to the voters. 

    Man­dat­ing that the board of a pub­lic agency be cho­sen through at large elec­tions or dis­trict based elec­tions does not mag­i­cal­ly guar­an­tee good gov­er­nance. Much depends on the cir­cum­stances. Yaki­ma, for instance, ben­e­fit­ed from switch­ing to a dis­trict-based mod­el because it wound up with a city coun­cil more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of its pop­u­la­tion. Sound Tran­sit, how­ev­er, already has a very diverse board. And it’s not just diverse geo­graph­i­cal­ly. Look again at the board roster. 

    The com­mis­sion­ers who over­see the ports of Seat­tle and Taco­ma are cho­sen by the vot­ers, and they’ve made some bone­head­ed deci­sions in recent years. The Port of Taco­ma unwise­ly rushed to court to block a local ini­tia­tive aimed at pro­tect­ing Taco­ma’s water from the bal­lot before its sig­na­ture gath­er­ing effort had even end­ed, and got in trou­ble with the state. The Port of Seat­tle, mean­while, just sev­ered ties with its CEO and oth­er senior staff are pay­ing back bonus­es they weren’t sup­posed to have received… bonus­es the Com­mis­sion authorized. 

    We already have a great many lay­ers of gov­ern­ment. Cities, coun­ties, ports, school dis­tricts, spe­cial dis­tricts… the list is long. Nobody can keep track of it all. It makes sense that a region­al agency like Sound Tran­sit be gov­erned by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of its part­ner cities and coun­ties, because ST is in the busi­ness of con­nect­ing com­mu­ni­ties together. 

    May­ors and coun­cilmem­bers under­stand the nuances of land use, for exam­ple, because it’s their wheel­house. Trans­porta­tion is but one facet of pub­lic plan­ning. Bad deci­sions result from oper­at­ing in silos. ST is for­tu­nate it does­n’t have that problem. 

    By defeat­ing SSB 5001, we can keep Sound Tran­sit on track and mov­ing forward.

    # by Andrew :: March 3rd, 2017 at 11:00 PM

  6. “quite a bit of geo­graph­ic diversity”??
    Balder­dashh! There is a whole chunk of Wash­ing­ton that is on the East side of the state who do NOT ben­e­fit from Sound Tran­sit and are not rep­re­sent­ed on this committee.
    It may not be “Seat­tle-cen­tric” but it sure­ly is “West Side centric”.

    # by DaveG :: March 8th, 2017 at 5:47 PM

    • Earth to Dave: Sound Tran­sit is a region­al, not statewide agency. Its juris­dic­tion is urban King, Pierce, and Sno­homish coun­ties. It does not oper­ate ser­vice or raise funds from out­side of the greater Seat­tle, Taco­ma, Everett, and Belle­vue met­ro­pol­i­tan area. So of course it does­n’t have any local lead­ers from East­ern Wash­ing­ton on its board.

      Save your out­rage for some­thing real and worth­while, like the Trump regime’s planned cuts to NOAA and EPA.

      # by Andrew :: March 8th, 2017 at 5:57 PM

  7. Sound tran­sit has yet to com­plete a project on time and on bud­get. The very notion the project should have been vot­ed on dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion only adds to the out­rage by res­i­dents and tax­pay­ers who had the wool pulled over their eyes.

    # by James :: March 29th, 2017 at 12:15 PM

    • False, James… Sound Tran­sit has com­plet­ed many projects on time and on bud­get. In fact, late­ly, Sound Tran­sit has been com­plet­ing projects ahead of sched­ule and under budget.

      For exam­ple, the Uni­ver­si­ty Link light rail exten­sion opened six months ahead of sched­ule and was built for $150 mil­lion less than anticipated.

      The Angle Lake Link exten­sion opened four years ahead of sched­ule and came in $40 mil­lion under budget. 

      I sug­gest you do some research before you leave your next com­ment. This is the first and last time we’ll approve a com­ment from you laden with false statements.

      # by Andrew :: March 29th, 2017 at 12:34 PM

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