The Puget Sound Regional Council largely serves as a conduit for allocating federal funds. With all the grim news in Pierce County, it’s a small consolation that the latest chunk of funding is $481,000 to Pierce County, replacement for aging vanpools and completion of preliminary engineering for Tacoma Link. You can comment on these uses from November 8th to December 6th:

How to make a comment:
Mail: Puget Sound Regional Council
ATTN: Kelly McGourty
1011 Western Avenue, Suite 500
Seattle, Washington 98104-1035
E-mail: tipcomment@psrc.org
In Person: December 6 at PSRC offices, 1011 Western Avenue, Suite 500, Seattle

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In yesterday’s Pierce Transit post I misread the recount policy, as pointed out by brilliant reader Bernie. This News Tribune piece explains how it actually works. Basically, the losing side has to fork over $200,000 to fund the recount.

I apologize for the error.

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[RSS readers: A previous version of this post was prematurely posted.  See below for the most updated version.]

One bit of good news to come out of the election was a strong showing from pro-transit legislative candidates, particularly those we endorsed.  The more surprising of these, which was actually more of an anti-endorsement than anything, was the defeat of Senator Mary Margaret Haugen by her Republican opponent, Barbara Bailey.  As we outlined in our endorsement, the promotion of a new Senate Transportation Committee chair from a Haugen defeat gave us more to cheer about than anything in Bailey’s transportation platform.

Many commenters rightfully expressed the concern that losing Haugen in the Senate could eradicate a Democratic majority, a risk we were willing to take given the previous majority’s lukewarm attitude towards transit.  At any rate, those fears were allayed after Democratic control was maintained by commanding victories from other Senate candidates, including pro-transit standouts like Jessyn Farrell, Marko Liias, Jake Fey, among others.

Haugen’s defeat means that the current vice-chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, Tracey Eide, will most likely be elevated to chair, a position that can make the difference between transit legislation passing and failing.  While Senator Eide doesn’t share the same pro-transit credentials as some of peers, her track-record for legislation friendly to transit advocates has been solid.  Most recently, she’s made tangible commitments to light rail expansion southward, even as her fellow South King County legislators cried foul.

While Senator Eide has her work cut out for her, she’s proven to be a reliable vote for transit, and an even more valuable one now given a likely promotion to Transportation Committee chair.  We have reason to be optimistic moving forward– but it will take commitment on all sides of the State government to get Olympia back into the picture.

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[UPDATE 9:50pm: Tonight’s drop grew the margin to 716 votes. 211 ballots came in today.]

As of Sunday evening, the margin is down to 695 votes, in favor of a NO. The auditor says the ballots received are starting to drop to a trickle, with only 341 received yesterday. But the margin is 0.36%, small enough to trigger an automatic machine recount. [UPDATE: A commenter points out that the linked rule may not apply to local measures. I’ve sent an email to the Pierce County auditor to find out. See the correction.]

Chris Karnes at Tacoma Tomorrow has the city-by-city breakdown of numbers through Friday. Tacoma and the relatively prosperous places near the water are the ones leading on this issue. It’s also interesting to me that Joint Base Lewis-McChord is breaking against the measure given that the on-post shopping options aren’t subject to sales tax, and given how strongly it went for Sound Transit 2 in 2008.

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Following on my personal values and vision of a better future, and our first overall call on Governor-elect Inslee to lead with his own environmental values, here is our view of the top priorities for improving our transportation system to become more sustainable:

• First and foremost, Inslee should hire a director for the state Department of Transportation who will put climate change reduction first, not highway expansion. The head of DOT has many roles, including a seat on the Sound Transit board. We need a transportation leader who will think long term and progressively, someone like New York City’s Janette Sadik-Khan. SDOT director Peter Hahn might be a good choice here, or Sound Transit’s Ric Ilgenfritz – not a politician, but a professional with good political understanding and a willingness to push the envelope. We have state law already requiring emissions reduction – we need a leader to demand it. There are almost always better options on the table than what DOT chooses now.
• He should ensure Amtrak Cascades operations are safely funded, and use this opportunity to make service better. Let’s pick a seat on our smartphone when we buy a ticket, not get one assigned in a long line before boarding. Let’s better fund King Street Station’s progress and make it a great regional hub. Let’s push hard on the capital improvements that will get the service running more often and faster – improvements that have already led to hundreds of millions in federal funding, and would win us more.
• He should ask for the development of a real rail plan for the state – with true high speed rail for the Seattle-Portland corridor, and with possibilities to connect cities outside Puget Sound with service too. What would it take to actually run electric rail in the Northwest? We need to know so we can fight for it. 110mph diesel trains aren’t good enough for our future.
• He should push to require local comprehensive plans actually meet climate reduction targets. Cities and counties shouldn’t be allowed to build more suburban subdivisions unless they’re reducing those emissions somewhere else. California already does this. Our local emissions need to trend down, not up. Continue reading “Our Priorities For Jay Inslee”

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This is an open thread.

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Sound Transit has a 6-minute survey they would like you to take. More information below.

Sound Transit is kicking off the process for working with South King County communities on options for extending high-capacity transit service. The effort will help shape alternatives for building high capacity transit from South 200th Street to Kent/Des Moines, as well as a shovel-ready plan for reaching the heart of Federal Way.

This is the public’s first chance to weigh in on this key regional project. There are several ways to give feedback, by attending and upcoming open house, or by taking our survey by Monday, Nov. 19.

…

Over the next year, Sound Transit will analyze alternatives to expand high capacity transit from the future light rail station at S. 200th Street in the City of SeaTac to the Federal Way Transit Center.

This project is known as the Federal Way Transit Extension. Right now, Sound Transit is in the early scoping phase of the project and is seeking public input on what alternatives should be studied. This is your first opportunity to comment and become involved in this project. This survey should take approximately six minutes to complete.

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Although most races are now decided, major media outlets have not called the governor’s race despite a consistent but narrow lead for Jay Inslee. I’m personally not much interested in spinning the statistics and am content to wait for everyone to be satisfied that the result is correct, but others apparently feel differently.

Far closer, however, is the Pierce Transit race, which means to raise sales taxes to add service rather than impose drastic cuts. Last night’s results show the no side ahead by 915 votes (50.28% no) with perhaps 80,000 ballots yet to be counted. Chris Karnes at Tacoma Tomorrow is analyzing the race exhaustively– including breakdowns by district – and has declared it too close to call.

An optimist would say we’d win those two, I-1185 will be ruled unconstitutional, C-Tran is in a whole different metropolitan area, and so it was a clean sweep (save for Sen. Steve Litzow and minor annexation measures) for STB’s endorsement slate. A pessimist might say that the Pierce Transit measure may be the only one to have a clear and concrete effect on Puget Sound transit riders, and a loss there would dwarf the importance of everything else.

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You can voice your support of the rezone proposal here or in person at the November 14th public hearing.

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Yesterday, I read a short piece in the Stranger that calls on Jay Inslee, governor-elect, to push hard in a few places he hasn’t yet shown much leadership. Part of their last section really caught my attention:

Use your power to push for mass transit that makes sense in the biggest county in the state—King County. It happens to be the county that just elected you, and it also happens to be the place where you can make a significant contribution to your real passion: environmental stewardship.

We’ve just spent eight years with a governor who’s been unwilling to lead on transit. She’s put forward road and highway expansion projects, but she has done no more than the bare minimum to support transit.

Jay Inslee ran as an environmental candidate. He’s talked a lot about green jobs and renewable energy, and worked in Congress to help promote both. But at home, the greenest jobs we can possibly create are those that build transit. And the most damaging jobs we can create are those expanding our highways, literally paving the way for climate change.

Jay Inslee’s values tell me he should be a leader on both transit and land use. How he was elected, and the people elected around him this week – like Jessyn Farrell and Jake Fey – tell me the voters want him to lead on transit too.

He’s not going to do it alone – we need to tell him what we want. Personally, I want a transportation package that fixes existing roads and bridges, builds bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure wherever it makes those repairs, and funds transit – a lot of it. What we found in 2007 with the failure of Roads and Transit is that people in Puget Sound don’t want more or bigger highways – and polling since then (and that whole 2008 Sound Transit 2 blowout) shows that there are two things we all agree on: we want to fix our aging infrastructure, and we want to build more transit.

If we’re going to have a dent in climate change, the package needs to be *mostly* transit – and mostly electric transit. It needs to fund Amtrak Cascades so we can get service levels up to a point where we can argue to electrify it. It needs to give Sound Transit enough revenue to speed up their projects and get ready for more. And it needs to keep our buses funded, and give local governments funding to make capital improvements so they’re more efficient.

Maybe it should tie some of these goals to land use, to encourage our agencies and governments to zone in order to make transit, walking and biking more successful. But regardless, it should not fund projects that will increase our emissions – only projects that will decrease them while improving our economy.

So to the governor-elect, I say: I want to see you lead with your values. Don’t support projects that make our future worse. If you need our help, ask, and we’ll be there to support you.

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