Sound Transit just opened its $240 million Pinehurst light rail station in North Seattle, a neighborhood of single-family homes and a golf course that is already within reach of two other stations—one about a mile away and another less than two miles away.

The development that was supposed to surround the station and provide a built-in population of riders has been delayed for years. Seattle officials never approved the zoning changes needed to make it happen. There’s no parking, either, meaning riders will largely have to arrive by bus or other means.

Sound Transit says the station will eventually serve 3,400 riders a day. The catch? That projection stretches into the 2050s. Back in 2016, the agency projected as few as 1,100 daily riders.

Former Sound Transit Board member David Baker called the project a “$240 million boondoggle” and said there was “no need for it.”

And the price tag is especially hard to ignore. The station was originally expected to cost about $65 million. By 2022, Sound Transit had allocated $240 million for construction.

That’s not exactly a rounding error.

Meanwhile, Sound Transit is facing a nearly $35 billion deficit and has delayed other major transit projects, including the Ballard light rail extension. Those projects were expected to serve tens of thousands of riders, yet budget problems have forced the agency to push them back and scale them down.

So what does Sound Transit do while staring down a multibillion-dollar financial hole?

Open a $240 million station with questionable ridership projections, no parking, delayed surrounding development and two existing stations nearby.

Former Seattle Councilmember Debora Juarez, who served on the Sound Transit Board from 2019 to 2023, spent years pushing for the station, arguing that North Seattle deserved another stop. She lobbied for it as a councilmember and continued advocating for it after joining the Sound Transit board.

Now taxpayers are left with the bill.

This is the fundamental problem with Sound Transit: There never seems to be a point where someone has to answer for whether the spending actually makes sense.

The agency has access to billions in taxpayer dollars, routinely asks voters to approve higher taxes and fees, and continues expanding a system whose costs keep growing. Yet when a project’s price jumps from $65 million to $240 million—or when ridership projections stretch decades into the future—there appears to be little consequence.

And when Sound Transit gets something wrong, taxpayers don’t get their money back.

They just get another tax bill.

Pinehurst isn’t merely a story about one questionable station. It’s a case study in what happens when a massive government agency can spend hundreds of millions of dollars without anyone seemingly being accountable for whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. Read more at The Center Square.

More than 100 angry PSE customers packed a four-hour Utilities and Transportation Commission hearing in Lacey Tuesday to protest the utility’s latest rate-hike proposal. PSE wants to jack up electricity rates 15% and natural-gas rates 14% next year, with more increases coming in 2028 and 2029.

All told, PSE wants another $1.5 billion from ratepayers over three years. By 2029, the typical electricity customer would be paying another $612 a year, while the typical gas customer would cough up another $276.

PSE says the increases are necessary to build infrastructure, meet growing energy demand and comply with Washington’s clean-energy mandates. And the utility isn’t exactly hiding the connection: Since Democrats passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act in 2019, PSE says its annual cost of acquiring power has more than tripled, from roughly $750 million to more than $2 billion. Compliance with CETA has added another estimated $820 million.

So much for the affordable part of “clean energy.”

The UTC will decide whether to approve the hikes, with a decision expected in January—just in time for the first spike in your bill. Read more at The Center Square.

In a new piece, Seattle Red’s Jason Rantz points out how Washington Democrats don’t need to rig the vote when they can apparently rig the messaging voters see before they cast it. A new poll on Initiative 645 shows just how much a single government-written sentence can move public opinion on the state’s 9.9% income tax.

A DHM Research poll of 800 Washington residents split respondents into two groups. Without the state-mandated disclosure, 44% opposed repealing the tax while 40% supported repeal. Add the required warning that repeal would reduce funding for K-12 schools, universities and healthcare, and opposition jumped to 57% while support dropped to 35%.

That’s quite a difference for one sentence—and especially convenient when the income tax doesn’t collect a dime until 2029. The ballot language was created under a 2022 law requiring the attorney general to attach an “investment impact disclosure” to measures that repeal or change taxes. The I-645 version warns voters that repeal would decrease funding for schools, higher education and healthcare, even though those programs aren’t currently receiving revenue from the tax.

Meanwhile, opponents were pushed from a referendum—which required 154,455 signatures—into an initiative requiring 308,911. They collected 511,408 anyway. The Legislature has also previously changed voter-approved initiatives, while the state Supreme Court has overturned others.

And then there’s the media. The Seattle Times, KING 5 and others have reported that the income tax will fund schools, childcare and healthcare without emphasizing that the tax currently generates nothing. In other words, the state writes the message, lawmakers make the process harder, and parts of the media repeat the sales pitch.

Nobody is stuffing ballot boxes. They apparently don’t have to. Read more at Seattle Red.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wants voters to believe she’s the champion of affordable health care. Her own campaign’s records raise a pretty obvious question: What about her staff?

The Washington Free Beacon found that Perez’s campaign has never paid for a group health plan for its employees. The same goes for her 2022 and 2024 campaigns. A former employee at the Portland auto shop Perez co-owns with her husband also told the outlet the business didn’t provide health insurance.

That’s an awkward contrast for a Democrat who regularly warns that Americans shouldn’t have to choose between groceries and medicine and calls expanding health care access a priority.

No law requires her small business or campaign to provide coverage. But Perez has made her small-business background a central part of her political brand while routinely telling other employers what they owe their workers.

Apparently, affordable health care is a priority—just not necessarily a campaign benefit.

Perez faces Republican John Braun in the November 3 general election. Read more at Seattle Red.

Staffers for the Senate Democratic Caucus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed two-year contract this week, and the reason wasn’t a giant pay demand. In fact, the deal offered no raise.

They wanted job security.

Legislative assistants, policy analysts and communications staff represented by the Washington Public Employees Association are currently at-will employees, meaning they can be fired at any time. The union wanted basic “just cause” protections and due process before termination.

Senate Administration negotiators wouldn’t budge.

That’s a particularly awkward position for Democrats, who routinely champion unions, stronger workplace protections and additional rights for employees. But apparently those principles have limits when the employer is the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The hypocrisy is even harder to miss because Republican caucus staffers in both chambers approved their contracts.

The state is facing budget pressure, so most public-sector unions have accepted contracts without immediate raises. Senate Democratic staffers weren’t demanding special treatment on pay. They were asking for the kind of job protections Democrats routinely argue workers deserve.

Instead, their own party’s Senate administration effectively said no.

Democrats can continue lecturing private employers about how they should treat workers. But when their own employees ask for basic protections, taxpayers get a front-row seat to just how quickly those principles can disappear. Read more at the Washington State Standard.

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