With Sound Transit's system expansion plans up in the air, officials representing the south end of the transit district in Pierce County are making one thing clear: light rail will stay on track to reach Tacoma Dome if they have anything to say about it.
Well over 100 South Sounders packed into a University of Washington Tacoma meeting room this week for a townhall focused on the 2016 Sound Transit 3 ballot measure, organized by the advocacy group Transportation Choices Coalition. Moderated by Tacoma On The Go's Laura Svancarek, the panel included Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello and Tacoma Councilmember Kristina Walker, who are both members of the Sound Transit board. Both spoke with a united voice about the fact that extending the 1 Line from Federal Way to Tacoma Dome is their top priority as Sound Transit grapples with a $34.5 billion budget shortfall over the coming decades.
"We deserve to have the line down here in Pierce County," Mello said to significant applause in the room, as he referenced recent grand openings to Federal Way and between Seattle and Bellevue that have expanded the Sound Transit system from a fledgling line into a full network.
"In just the last five years, it's been like a rocket ship. We've doubled our miles of light rail service and doubled the amount of stations in just the last five years. So we are on a roll, and it's our job to keep ourselves on that really awesome trajectory," Mello said. "We're going to get light rail to Tacoma, come hell or high water. We will."
The Tacoma Dome Link Extension is currently scheduled to open in 2035, adding four new stations in South Federal Way, Fife, and Tacoma. But different approaches to closing the sizable budget gap that have been put on the table including a potential truncation of the line at Fife until additional funds are available – an idea that's been treated as a non-starter in the only county without any stations in the Link light rail network right now.
"When they said stop in Fife... that's a no," Walker said on a recent episode of KUOW's Soundside, on which I also appeared as a guest. "We are not going to that answer, we are not stopping in Fife. We have to get light rail to Tacoma. But in working through that process, it did very effectively get us thinking about what we can do, what is possible, and what the real problem is."
That real problem is a clear structural budget issue. More likely than stopping in Fife is a deferral of a planned line to Issaquah, currently tabbed for 2044, and a truncation of the biggest project in the ST3 plan, Ballard Link. All three of the different options put in front of board members last month would cut that line short at either Seattle Center or Smith Cove, throwing the timeline for rail to actually reach Ballard up in the air and fully activating transit advocates in Seattle.
Meanwhile on the other end of the planned system in Everett, officials including Sound Transit board chair Dave Somers are also adamant that the other end of the rail "spine" can't be on the chopping block either. Next week, Somers is expected to release his proposal on how to rebalance the system, with the extensions to Downtown Everett and Tacoma Dome least likely to be given a haircut. But that doesn't mean Pierce County won't have to take cuts that impact transit riders, with other ST3 projects still likely to be deferred to balance the budget.
"We have a really big challenge ahead of us," Mello said. "The Pierce County delegation has never been more organized, and has never been more unified. We work really well together, and we are working with the Sound Transit staff and our Sound Transit Board members to bring an abundance of clarity about what is our most important priorities and where we go from there. Clearly our number one priority in the Pierce County delegation is to complete the spine, to get to Fife and to get to Tacoma Dome. That is clearly our number one priority. From there, we have other important projects that the region really is relying on."
The ST3 plan also funded an extension of the existing T Line streetcar from its current terminus at St Joseph's Hospital to Tacoma Community College along S 19th Street. Unlike Tacoma Dome Link, it hasn't even entered the planning stage, a fact that means any potential cuts are much more opaque when it comes to their direct impact.
"The T line right now, it's a line on the map. It's someone's dream. It's really not much more than that. It's a line on the map, a really important line on the map," Mello said. "We need to kick this thing into the planning [stage], so we can do that planning and do that engineering. Really understand where the station is going to go. How do you engineer this thing, how much exactly is it going to cost and by what time."
And then there's the Sounder S Line, the commuter rail line that was extended to Lakewood as part of the 2008 Sound Transit 2 ballot measure. ST3 was set to extend it even further, to the far reaches of the taxing district in DuPont. Also potentially facing cuts, Mello referenced an announcement forthcoming later this year that could involve a creative way to deliver that extension. Unlike many of the other areas where Sound Transit operates commuter rail, the tracks to DuPont are actually owned by the agency, putting significantly more options on the table.
Highlighting the opportunity that the current budget realignment has provided to be able to shine a light on Sound Transit's constraints and challenges, Mello summarized what he hoped the outcome will be: clear momentum to keep projects advancing into design so that additional opportunities can be seized on immediately.
"What I think success looks like after this very arduous and thoughtful process is that we are able to build the most expansion, bring the most expansion possible of high capacity transit throughout the territory, and at the same time, being as bold as we can be, planning to keeping the system moving for the projects that we absolutely can't commit to building today," Mello said. "Keeping them in a planning phase, so that we can continue to find the cost reductions, continue to put ourselves in line for federal funds or other dollars, so that when we solve those problems, we can move those projects."
Echoing that, Walker also outlined a clear expectation around transparency, and the need to show communities that have been waiting years for projects when they can expect to see movement.
"What I really want to come out of this is a very clear document that tells you exactly what's going to happen in your community. So it's not: 'okay, we'll build Tacoma Dome, and then we'll see when we get to the rest of it.' It's: when are we going to do what and how – something that's very specific, because, again, you have this $34.5 billion problem. We're going to have to make some tough decisions that not everyone's going to like. But I want to see something that we put forward as an agency, as a board, as a staff, that tells you exactly when your project is coming and how we're going to figure out how we get there."
Doug Trumm
Doug Trumm
