[Update, Friday 10:46am: Freighthouse Square owner Brian Borgelt has responded to recent coverage here and elsewhere with a scathing email that a source shared with STB, reading in part, “the legion of dingbats has attacked en masse, as they always do.” Read the full email here.]

[Update, Thursday 12:03pm: Though the News Tribune didn’t disclose the financial terms under dispute, a source speaking on condition of anonymity disclosed to STB that the assessed value of WSDOT’s portion of Freighthouse Square is $300,000, that WSDOT has offered Borgelt $1.5m, and that Borgelt is demanding $6.1m]

The Tacoma News Tribune broke the news Wednesday night that planned Amtrak service at Tacoma’s Freighthouse Square (FHS) may be in jeopardy. Negotiations with current FHS owner Brian Borgelt have gone badly enough that WSDOT has initiated eminent domain processes and is now publicly looking for alternative locations for Amtrak as a fallback plan.

WSDOT’s Janet Matkin wrote to a Tacoma advisory committee to relay the news. From the News Tribune:

“Negotiations to purchase the identified portion of the building are at an impasse and any further delays that impact the construction process will make it impossible for WSDOT to meet deadlines for building the new station,” Janet Matkin, WSDOT’s rail division communications manager, wrote to advisory committee members.

A new station is necessary because the department beginning in mid-2017 will reroute Amtrak passenger trains from their present waterfront route to a route through South Tacoma, Lakewood and DuPont. The new route will relieve congestion on the tracks along Puget Sound and cut several minutes off Amtrak’s Seattle-Portland schedule.

“Funding for the new station is through a federal grant and the Federal Railroad Administration determined that under this grant, negotiations to acquire the building could not begin until October 2015. The grant also stipulates that all construction for the station must be completed by summer 2017. No alternative funds have been identified to extend the construction beyond this deadline,” the department wrote.

In the February 5 post on I-405 tolling, I described how WSDOT had agreed to changes in I-405 HOT lane operations. Those include toll-free travel for all vehicles on evenings, weekends and holidays.

I should have also mentioned that changes to tolling remain subject to approval by the Washington State Transportation Commission. At this point, the WSTC has not approved the changes described. The WSTC’s first review of the legislators’ request is this Wednesday, February 17.

By the standards of most transit agency budgets, Sound Transit’s next round of rail expansion plans will be expensive. Critics, constructive or not, wonder if there’s a cheaper way. There is, in principle, if the transit agency can simply ignore other stakeholders instead of buying them off. The biggest savings comes from simply taking grade-separated freeway space and kicking out as many cars as necessary to ensure free flow of buses.

But that presumes a totally different set of politicians, voter attitudes, and institutional structures from what precipitated the sorry defenestration of Transportation Secretary Peterson earlier this month. Her departure was related to several issues, but the direct cause ($) was the entirely foreseeable backlash against reserving uncongested road space for carpools and transit. Indeed Senate Transportation Chair Curtis King publicly wonders if WSDOT is extracting enough transit dollars from Sound Transit to pump back into the road system. While Republicans are generating all the juicy quotes, Democratic majorities didn’t keep the HOV lanes clear either. Passing a small ST tax package and assuming that WSDOT will deliver good ROW would be foolish in the extreme.

In this environment, truly reliable transit has to build its own right of way. Some Seattle residents snicker at the Everett-Tacoma light rail “spine”, and there are legitimate criticisms of that project. However, it would deliver a commute free of ever-escalating driving times and frequent congestion collapse due to accidents.

STB will always wholeheartedly support using precious road space to carry lots of people on transit instead of a few people in cars (or worse, to store cars). It’s at least plausible to achieve this when local leaders and voters are self-identified transit advocates, as they usually are at the city and county level, and therefore open to pro-transit arguments.  Regrettably, the city and county don’t own much freeway right of way. At the level of government that does own most of it, the center of gravity of the debate is over subtle impacts to SOV travel times. The overwhelmingly positive impact on bus riders is both undisputed, and irrelevant.

Choosing freeway rapid transit as the long-term solution forever holds transit hostage to the whims of a state that considers its fate a low priority, and forever allows highway widening to masquerade as a “pro-transit” measure to ensure the free flow of buses. It’s one reason why people all over the region are hoping for ST3 to deliver them from this trap with light rail – on its own right of way.

This is an open thread.

At Thursday’s meeting of Sound Transit’s Capital Committee, Executive Director for Construction Management Ahmad Fazel revealed that problems with tunnel boring machine Pamela are worse than previously thought. Mike Lindblom has more of the technical details ($) in his piece filed last night.

The machine had been stalled since December 28th near 47th & Brooklyn, roughly 650′ north of the future UDistrict Station, but Sound Transit restarted Pamela yesterday and was able to advance enough to fix one concrete ring. Pamela’s sister machine Brenda also struggled through the hard glacial till of the UDistrict, needing cutterhead repairs before continuing on to UW Station, but Pamela’s damage has been revealed to be much more severe. Meanwhile, Brenda is cruising along, entering UW property last week and is currently underneath Kane Hall nearly halfway between UDistrict Station and UW Station. (see graphic at right).

Sound Transit’s primary plan is to try to coddle Pamela but keep the machine in use – using lower torque and mining only about 10′ per day – taking 2 months to bore the final 650′ into UDistrict Station, which will serve as a makeshift repair site before continuing south to UW Station.

While these developments are worrying, it absolutely cannot be stressed enough how this situation differs from any tempting comparison to Bertha and the waterfront tunnel project, both in structural characteristics and in responsible project management.

First and foremost, Pamela and Brenda (and Balto and Togo before them) are standard machines the likes of which are used all over the world, unlike the precedent-busting, one-of-a-kind, 2,500 sq ft beast that is Bertha. If Pamela fails completely, Sound Transit can refurbish Brenda to complete the 2nd bore from UDistrict to UW, it can also use Brenda to bore northward to reach Pamela for repairs,  and “Sequential Excavation Mining” would likely be used to reach Pamela. In a bit of great project management that stands in stark contrast to Bertha, Sound Transit’s contract also required a 3rd TBM be available for backup.

It should also be repeatedly stressed that this is the first major setback since the Beacon Hill tunnel for Central Link. In the combined 14 miles of tunneling for ULink and North Link, Sound Transit has already mined roughly 12 miles without a hitch until Pamela’s troubles. When it comes to Bertha, we talk in feet instead of miles.

Because of this foresight and planned redundancy, Fazel stressed to the committee that even a tunneling delay is 3-8 months is not estimated to impact overall deliverables, and that Northgate Link is still estimated to be on time and on budget. Current costs are running roughly ~$100m below the 2016 budget, giving Sound Transit breathing room for contingencies and repairs.