The (Everett) Herald, in previewing the upcoming year in politics, leads readers to a compelling question – after years of broken promises, will Snohomish County voters trust Sound Transit enough to vote on a multi-billion-dollar tax package this fall?
Voters across Sound Transit’s three-county territory are all used to big promises and little return from the Seattle-centric transit agency. But perhaps no area has received less value for its tax dollars than folks living up north. As the Herald suggests, “This year’s biggest scrap in Snohomish County is likely to be whether voters decide a 20-year-old promise to bring light rail to downtown Everett is worth keeping — even it means paying higher taxes and waiting another 20 years for the first train to arrive.”
Snohomish County voters have reason to be concerned because, to satisfy Seattle’s insatiable demand for more public dollars, Sound Transit is now considering whether more light rail within the big city – from Ballard to West Seattle, say, or another downtown rail tunnel – are more important than keeping promises to get trains to Everett. Even if such a plan means doubling the size of this year’s tax increase.
Again, the Herald, “(Edmonds Mayor Dave) Earling, an original Sound Transit board member from the early 1990s, said the agency must keep its promise to serve Everett before branching out. ‘It’s our duty, as a board, to stick to that commitment from many years ago,’ Earling has said. ‘We think it’s important to build the right system, as opposed to the cheapest system.’ “
Of course, for politicians everywhere, when spending taxpayer dollars, the “cheapest system” is never the right choice.
And especially not for Sound Transit.
Relief you guys have made clear you guys want to take us back to the 1990s with NO Sound Transit. No matter what Sound Transit does, you guys want to shut it down. Well at least we cleared that up on the fifth day of 2016.
I’m not sure where I stand on ST3. But I know you guys are part of the problem on the transit debate. Not everybody can or should be in a Single Occupancy Vehicle.
It’s really amazing, isn’t it? They complain incessantly about how we need to reduce congestion, without revealing how we can possibly attain this goal without improving mass transit.
Their cheap shot against Seattle was really revealing — not only is the region’s largest city a logical place to build more transit, but either the writer(s) here know nothing about ST’s sub-area equity, or they’re feigning ignorance to play to the anti-Seattle bigotry of their readers.
Well put. I like some of this semi-anon blog’s posts, but these guys need to find The Call of Duty to SUPPORT mass transit.
Vastly overpriced and inflexibly fixed rail service is NOT the answer to public transit mobility except in highly and densely populated locales. It takes too long to build and only gets increasingly costly at an exponential rate. The only reason this keeps going is that the people who really like choo-choo trains have brainwashed voters to keep expanding the boondoggle called Sound Transit. Besides that the entire thing is administered badly with five different transit agencies operating within the tri-county area, all of which are run, to a greater or lesser degree, inefficiently.