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.