Tomorrow the Sound Transit board votes, and for once North Seattle and South King County are fighting over the same shrinking pie at the same time. I'm Cassidy, and this is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. On deck: the Strauss amendment for tomorrow's board meeting, a named at-risk station in South King, a data center moratorium that's drawing real industry pushback, and one housing project that actually has a date on it. And for once the ST3 fight isn't some abstract spreadsheet war — Boeing Access Road is on the table by name, and the board votes in less than twenty-four hours. Alright, let's get into it. My Ballard, with Meghan Walker:
In a newsletter on Friday, Strauss said the Sound Transit Board will discuss a proposal that would fund light rail only to Seattle Center while indefinitely postponing the extension from Seattle Center to Ballard without allocating funding for its construction.
We're following up on the ST3 tunnel fight we've been tracking all week, and now Strauss has moved this from newsletter land to the actual board agenda. My Ballard's Meghan Walker confirmed the vote is tomorrow, May 28, and Strauss wants to pull Seattle's funding away from the second downtown tunnel — the one he pegs at nearly eleven billion dollars — and send it toward a Westlake-to-Ballard starter line. Eleven billion for a tunnel with no funding source, or rail to Ballard that might actually happen — I get why Strauss is making that trade. But he's trying to swap out one voter-approved project for another, and we still don't know if he has the board votes to do it. And here's the geographic problem: the same truncation fight swallowing the tunnel debate is now threatening South King County stations too. Boeing Access Road got named directly in an op-ed this week. So tomorrow isn't just Ballard versus the tunnel — it's which subarea's promises get deferred first. Boeing Access Road is a second 1 Line stop for a city that was already promised coverage. That's a working-class ridership argument sitting right next to Strauss's Ballard pitch, and nobody on the board has said the quiet part out loud yet. From Seattle Transit Blog:
Sound Transit finally addressed their severe budget shortfalls at the March 18 Board Retreat. The transit agency looked at three different approaches to build ST3. All three approaches investigated involve heavy truncations with some lines being completely eliminated.
Seattle Transit Blog got the March 18 board retreat breakdown, and the picture is blunt: Sound Transit ran three scenarios for finishing ST3, and all three involve heavy truncations. Not one of them builds the full plan voters approved. And look at what gets cut in two out of three approaches — Graham Street infill, Boeing Access Road infill, the T Line, Sounder to DuPont. That's not trimming fat, that's gutting South King County. Ballard still shows up in all three, just shorter. To be fair, Ballard gets truncated in every scenario too — either to Seattle Center or Smith Cove, both short of the full line. But the split is real: Approach 3 is the only one that builds Boeing Access Road and Graham infill, and it's also the one that cuts Everett short and stops Tacoma Dome at Fife. So tomorrow the board votes on Strauss's starter-line amendment, and the menu on the table is basically: pick your truncation. South King gets its stations only if North Seattle and the suburbs take the cuts instead. That's the choice. I want somebody to say that plain at the board meeting. From Rhonda Lewis at The Urbanist:
At the end of the month, the Sound Transit Board will decide whether to deliver on the decades-old promise to South King County to build the Boeing Access Road (BAR) and Graham Street stations. Both stations have already been approved — and paid for — by residents. Promises for these stations have already been broken before.
Rhonda Lewis published in The Urbanist yesterday, and she's making the case for Boeing Access Road — the infill station that would give Tukwila a second stop on the 1 Line, next to Tukwila International Boulevard. She's not talking in generalities here. She's naming the station, naming the city, and doing it the day before the May 28 vote. Tukwila. Not Ballard, not downtown Seattle — Tukwila. A working-class, majority-BIPOC city that was promised a second station and is now watching the truncation conversation happen mostly around North Seattle tunnel sequencing. If the board punts tomorrow, Boeing Access Road is one of the stations that gets quietly sacrificed. Lewis frames it as a regional promise — three counties, one system, equity as the stated premise. That's a lot harder to brush off than 'we want the tunnel faster.' In one news cycle, the fault line is visible: South King naming its stations, North Seattle fighting over sequencing. And Strauss's amendment is the thing getting all the oxygen heading into tomorrow. So South King is out there making the equity case in an op-ed, and Ballard is working it from inside the board room. Those are not equal positions of power. From Justin Carder at CHS Capitol Hill Seattle News:
The Low Income Housing Institute’s $1.1 million, 32-tiny house “emergency transitional encampment” broke ground last week with trucks arriving to deliver the 96-square-foot homes to the empty lot in the 1700 block of Belmont Ave.
Thirty-two units, $1.1 million, groundbreaking already happened, open by July. I'm going to need somebody to write that sentence down and tape it to the wall of every Seattle planning meeting, because that's what a timeline looks like. CHS has the LIHI groundbreaking: 96-square-foot homes, 24/7 staffing, case management, community kitchen. This is emergency transitional housing, not permanent supportive housing, and the lot is already slated for a DESC redevelopment later on. So the units are real, but the permanence question is still there. I'll take 'real units arriving on trucks in May' over 'permanent housing in the EIS phase' any day. The permanence argument is how you run out the clock on people sleeping outside. From Amy Sundberg at The Urbanist:
In April, The Seattle Times broke the news that four companies were seeking to build five mega data centers within Seattle City Light’s service area. While the Seattle area already plays host to around 30 data centers, the new facilities under discussion would be built on a much larger scale and use a great deal more electricity than anything that exists in the area today.
Amy Sundberg in The Urbanist has the update on the data center moratorium, and it's moving. The specific mechanism is on the table now: charge new data centers higher energy rates through Seattle City Light so other ratepayers aren't stuck absorbing the load hit. Two of the five mega data centers already pulled out after the Seattle Times broke this in April — but Equinix and Prologis are still in with three projects, two of them in SoDo. So yes, the backlash is doing something. The biggest players just haven't blinked. Here's what I want to watch: Juarez, Lin, and Hollingsworth paired the moratorium with an infrastructure impact resolution. That's the study-first move. The question is whether that resolution survives the industry pressure, or gets quietly hollowed out before anyone even scopes the study. City Light is the same utility ratepayers are counting on for transit electrification and cooling centers. You can't run AI server farms and a public grid buildout off the same wire without somebody deciding who waits. That's not a study question. That's a priority question. Got a correction, a tip, or a story idea for Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily? Send it to seattledailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read your notes, and they help shape the show.
If you want to go deeper, we've put links to every story from today's briefing in the show notes. Take a look and follow whichever threads caught your ear.
That's Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Wednesday, May 27th. This is a Lantern Podcast.