A Seattle city committee voted on a slate of amendments to the Seattle Transit Measure (STM) levy renewal Mayor Wilson proposed. The meeting video has the proceedings. It’s three and a half hours long, and parts of it were confusing to me. I watched the debates and votes on 6 of the 22 amendments. This alone took an hour and fifty minutes (from 0:45:36 to 2:36:41 in the video). I got exhausted at that point and didn’t watch the rest, so I’ll leave it to the comment section to report on how the other amendments fared. The entire measure with some amendments passed the committee, and will go to the full city council on Tuesday. Nine councilmembers participated: Rivera, Kettle, Hollingsworth, Juarez, Lin, Strauss, Foster, Rinck, and Saka.
Many readers are most interested in Amendment 13, which would reduce the sales tax rate from Mayor Wilson’s proposal. That amendment failed 2-7. That debate is just before the 2:46:00 mark.
Three amendments (1, 4, 28) were “withdrawn” for refinement, but then they were voted on anyway before the other individual amendments, so I don’t understand that procedure. Amendment 1 (passed) had a long debate; it wasn’t about transit service per se but about committing to certain safety strategies to deter passenger misbehavior. Amendment 4 (passed) requests an annual report from Metro on fare compliance, farebox recovery, reliability, and on-time performance of STM-purchased service, with comparisons to peer agencies and past statistics. Amendment 25 (failed) would have requested a report on expanding the Transit Access Program.
The other amendments I watched were 3 (passed) on how to spend money Metro can’t accept (e.g., if it doesn’t have enough drivers to implement requested runs), and 5 (failed) to extend the levy term three months (the failure means it will expire at the end of 2032).
What else do you see in the results?
As I understand it, the amendments that were withdrawn but still voted on were actually withdrawn from a package of uncontroversial amendments, as it turned out they were a little controversial.
It doesn’t look like any of the amendments are significant. Almost all of them do nothing more than require Metro to do more reports. A few small changes to allowable uses of funds, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that any of these allowances will be exercised.
Just a bunch of bike-shedding.