Water Taxi to Des Moines?

June 1, 2007 at 4:42 pm
by Andrew Smith


The Highline Times thinks its possible under the new Ferry District in King County. The ferry service would be model after a passenger-only ferry between San Francisco and (I think) Tiburon.

Speaking of King County, have you seen this annexation page? Basically, the county is trying to get out of the business of running services in unincorporated areas such as Skyway, North Highline and Juanita. They have encouraged cities to look at annexing the unincorporated areas near them and want all the “urban unincorporated areas” annexed or incorporated by 2012. Recently voters in Renton voted down the annexation of East Renton Highlands, and if Renton residents don’t want the affluent Highlands, what makes anyone think that they will successfully annex Skyway?

Meanwhile, Seattle and Burien are fighting it out over North Highline, also known as White Center. Seattle wants to annex it but some people in the city wonder if it offers any advantage to Seattle. Burien wants to annex part of it, but since Seattle is willing to get the whole thing, they are unable to officially take that stance. The problem for Burien is that North Highline’s 32,400 people are about as many as Burien’s 34,000 and would create a $3.5 million loss on a $15 million budget for Burien, that’s with a sales tax sharing from the state for 10 years (Cities over 400,000 people, of which Seattle is the only one, are not eligible for the sales tax sharing from the state.). For Seattle, the area would cost about $4.6 million out of a total budget of close to $2 billion.

In Burien, the vast majority of the population is against annexation, in Seattle no body really seems to care much one way or another. In North Highline, their is a mild majority tilting toward Burien. They will be the people who ultimately decide. To make the whole thing more complicated, there’s the whole issue of who will pay for the replacement of the South Park Bridge which is set to fail to pieces any day now. Neither city wants to pay for the $70 million it’ll cost to replace the bridge. It’ll be weird to see how things play out on this and the other annexations.

Tacoma Streetcar

June 1, 2007 at 9:59 am
by Andrew Smith


There is a growing movement in Tacoma to expand/bring back their streetcar system. I don’t know enough about Tacoma to know whether it is something useful, but if ST2 brings Link all the way to Tacoma, you could imagine this being pretty useful.

RTID nearing completion

June 1, 2007 at 1:04 am
by Andrew Smith

The PI reports that RTID’s executive committee voted 6-1 to move a version of the bill forward to a planning committee. The version they are considering is without the “cross-base highway” that has a lot of greens upset. The rub is that Pierce County Executive and Sound Transit Chairman John Ladenburg has threatened to veto any version of the RTID that did not include the cross-base highway. This is important because the new Sound Transit package, ST2, will be co-billed with RTID, so we won’t get our transit package if a majority of voters in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties don’t approve the bill.

Meanwhile, WashPirg, which has come out against RTID/ST2 in part because of the crossbase highway may come around on the new RTID/ST2 package as Bill LaBorde, state director for WashPIRG said:

“Happy enough” is a good way to put it. Bad stuff remains on the RTID project list but, in addition, to removing Cross-Base, we feel that the new policy language in the RTID plan gives us a foothold to change the way several of the RTID projects are ultimately built out and operated in the future. I guess the best way to put it is we’re now at a point where the good of adding 50 miles of light rail has begun to outweigh the potential harm from the RTID projects.

Stay tuned for more roads and transit drama…