Dan Strauss just put his name on a starter-line amendment to Sound Transit’s board, and the cost math already in the record starts at five-point-six billion in overruns before anybody moves a single wall. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. We’ve got a tunnel fight, a permit denial that took one week, and a council president basically admitting the Aurora response was running on empty. We’ve spent three episodes treating ST3 like an abstraction. Today there’s an actual amendment with Strauss’s name on it, so now we can run it against numbers instead of vibes. Yeah. Let’s see how much of that reform nerve is real. Ryan Packer, writing in The Urbanist:
With the Sound Transit board days away from voting on a update to the Sound Transit 3 plan, a move that is poised to take completion dates for numerous major transit projects off the calendar, Seattle Councilmember Dan Strauss has reignited a conversation about whether funding to build a second light rail tunnel in Downtown Seattle could be shifted elsewhere.
Ryan Packer at The Urbanist has the Strauss amendment: he’s pushing a directive to prioritize a Westlake-to-Ballard starter line before the second downtown tunnel goes in the ground. And this lands one day before the board votes on a plan update that’s already taking completion dates off the calendar. So the same board that just spent a week sorting winners and deferrals on a thirty-four-point-five billion dollar gap is now getting handed a motion to reopen the tunnel question from inside the room. If you were already deferred, who eats the collateral damage if Strauss’s amendment gets traction? That’s the cost-math test we’ve been building toward since episode one of this arc. We’ve already got five-point-six to six-point-three billion in overruns on the record, before any restructuring — and now the starter-line idea is the first concrete proposal that has to survive those numbers. And the tunnel funding structure is regionwide by exception — Everett to Lakewood is on the hook here, not just Seattle’s subarea. So Strauss isn’t just shuffling Seattle’s priorities; he’s reaching into money that suburban board members already voted themselves into. So Sound Transit is tens of billions over budget and years behind schedule. Who actually has the authority to tear up a voter-approved plan like the downtown tunnel, and what happens to everything else if they do? The short answer is the Sound Transit board — elected officials from around the region, mayors, county executives, council members — and they do have real power here. But voters approved ST3 in 2016, so that power sits in tension with the plan itself. The pressure driving this is enormous: per the Seattle Times, the West Seattle extension is at somewhere between $7.1 and $7.9 billion for just four track miles and four stations, and KUOW is reporting a nearly $35 billion funding gap across the full ST3 program. That’s why board members are floating drastic options. King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, the board’s vice chair, proposed what she called a big swing: scrapping the second downtown transit tunnel entirely. Sound Transit’s own analysis said that could save up to $4.5 billion, per The Urbanist, but it also flagged major service impacts and delays to other lines that would have to share the existing tunnel. And then Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss came in with a middle-ground amendment, flipping the build order and prioritizing a surface or elevated starter line between Westlake and Ballard before committing to a new tunnel. So now that version is in play as the board moves toward an updated ST3 vote. If dropping or delaying the tunnel saves $4.5 billion on paper, why isn’t that the obvious call? What’s actually at risk for the projects that take the hit in that trade-off? The core issue is capacity. The downtown tunnel can only take so much, and if you squeeze Ballard trains into it, every line sharing that tunnel gets a frequency penalty. And you can already see the domino effect regionally: Tacoma is fighting to keep its Dome station after Sound Transit floated ending that line at Fife instead, which is a pretty clean example of how fast “we’ll find savings somewhere” turns into “your promised station is gone.” Mayor Harrell has publicly pushed Sound Transit to prioritize the West Seattle and Ballard extensions as the highest-ridership corridors, but the coming board vote is the first real test of whether that pressure becomes a funded, scheduled commitment — or just another round of deferred promises. From The Center Square:
Saka and Wilson want to float a bond issue to pay for the project. Last year, during discussions about the project, a $1.5 billion figure was discussed. With interests and fees, property owners could end up paying $2.5 billion to repay the cost of the bonds.
Ron Saka is chairing the committee shepherding this renovation, and his answer on taxpayer cost is basically: unknown, but we’d like private dollars to match at one-to-one, maybe three-to-one. That’s not a financing plan. That’s a wish list attached to a bond that property owners could be on the hook for up to two-point-five billion dollars to repay. Meanwhile, SSHD’s sixty-one-million-dollar Belltown acquisition is getting held up this week as a model of transparent public development. You’ve got two public-money stories running at once — one with line-item accountability, one where the council sponsor literally can’t tell you what the tax increase will be. Seattle Center has the Space Needle on it. It’ll be fine. The property taxpayers funding the bonds? Less clear. Worth flagging: we spent two episodes asking whether Seattle had the political infrastructure to run a meaningful vacancy-tax revenue disclosure regime. If the city can’t put a number on a campus renovation it’s actively trying to put on the ballot, that question kind of answers itself. This one's from r/Seattle:
The City of Seattle's Special Events Committee has denied our permit application for The Ave for All street closure events planned for May 30 and June 6. The events are cancelled for those dates. The Committee acknowledged that our outreach plan met all notification requirements and raised no concerns about our operational planning.
The Special Events Committee’s own letter says the organizers met every notification requirement — no operational concerns, no outreach problems. The denial came from businesses outside the closure route, and they filed opposition late. One week out. Outside the closure route. These weren’t even businesses that would have been on the car-free block. SDOT let late-filing outsiders kill a permitted community pilot while taking half a decade to status-report whether streetcar tracks are a hazard. The asymmetry isn’t subtle. And the U District has a documented five-acre public open space deficit — that’s in the organizers’ own language, but it’s also the kind of number that ought to be in city planning documents. This isn’t a fringe ask. It’s the Vision Zero corridor slowdown in a different building: stakeholder process as a veto mechanism. They’re still asking for the two September dates. My question is why the mayor’s office isn’t already on the phone — or is “the Committee has spoken” going to be the whole answer here? From Gee Scott and Ursula Reutin at MyNorthwest:
“The goal by the end of the year is to have 1,258 officers. And last year we were net positive. This year we’re still on the same track,” Hollingsworth explained. “I do know that there are potential hurdles in that, with the budgeting piece. Understanding that adding new officers costs more funding and money, but I know that people are committed to kind of restoring the whole spectrum of public safety in our city.”
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That’s Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Tuesday. This is a Lantern Podcast.