Seattle made some big promises — and then reality showed up and said, no, actually. This is The Seattle Daily Fix. Today, we’ve got two accountability checks: one on Sound Transit’s reach, and one on whether the homelessness authority can actually account for itself. Ballard’s still waiting on rail, and KCRHA’s still waiting on results. Same energy. Alright, let’s get into it. First up, Ryan Packer in The Urbanist:
Set to be discussed at a board committee meeting tomorrow, Somers' plan would keep Sound Transit focused on building the light rail "spine" to Everett Station and Tacoma Dome, but defer or delay other key projects from the 2016 voter-approved ST3 plan. West Seattle Link, a project touted as "shovel-ready" after receiving federal approval last year, would advance but a planned line between South Kirkland and Issaquah would be pushed to 2050 – nine years later than the previous target.
Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers has a plan to plug the agency’s revenue hole — and the short version is, the spine to Everett and Tacoma survives, Ballard gets cut at the knees, and Graham Street infill is suddenly a question mark again. Graham Street has been “almost funded” for, what, a decade? Rainier Valley voters passed ST3 in 2016 and they’re still waiting on a station that should’ve been done years ago — and now it’s “thrown up in the air” again? That’s not a revenue problem. That’s a priorities problem. To be fair to Somers, this is better than the three options the board floated at the March retreat. At least the projects have real completion dates now, even if those dates are grim. And The Urbanist has been all over this story all spring. Ballard Link is the highest-ridership project in the whole package, and that’s the one getting hacked apart. So we protect the suburban spine and defer the urban core? That math doesn’t work for the people actually riding this thing. Next one’s from Capitol Hill Seattle:
Tuesday, the council approved a motion to “strengthen oversight” of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and “establish a structured, fact-based process to evaluate its future.” The motion follows release of an audit showing the regional authority has a $44.7 million spending hole with millions unaccounted for.
King County Council voted Tuesday to demand a corrective actions report from the Regional Homelessness Authority — after an audit found a negative cash position of nearly forty-five million dollars, with structural spending problems where the money going out kept outpacing the money coming in. Capitol Hill Seattle has been on this story. A two-hundred-million-dollar annual budget, tens of millions unaccounted for, and the answer is a report due August first? People are sleeping on sidewalks right now. The barn door line basically writes itself. To be fair, the council also commissioned the forensic audit last summer, so they’re not totally asleep. But this authority was sold as the consolidation that would finally cut through the dysfunction — and now the dysfunction is inside the consolidation. That’s the whole pattern. Build a new regional body, fund it at scale, skip the accountability infrastructure, then act shocked when it bleeds out. Seattle’s done this playbook before, and it never lands differently. You’ll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes, so if a story stuck with you, you can tap through and read a little deeper.
That’s The Seattle Daily Fix for this Thursday, May 7th. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.