A rendering of the West Seattle Link Extension’s planned cable-stayed bridge over the Duwamish. (Sound Transit)
Last week, Sound Transit released the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the West Seattle Link Extension (WSLE) ahead of its scheduled publication date of September 20. Although there’s technically one more comment period allowed for the FEIS, the massive document and its findings present a detailed review of each of the potential alternative paths Link may take from SODO to West Seattle.
Although the FEIS is focused on a vast range of potential tangible and intangible impacts the project may have, left unstated are the potential impacts of the project costs significantly exceeding Sound Transit’s assumptions in their 2021 Realignment.
Ever since the Sound Transit 3 ballot measure was being assembled, the West Seattle Link Extension has been a contentious project. Frank Chiachiere wrote in 2016: “not since the days of the Monorail has a rapid transit extension stirred up so much debate amongst the armchair planners.” Transit advocates have long known the project would be expensive and difficult, but for an extension that was strongly demanded by Seattle leaders and definitively approved by ST3 voters, why is it still so controversial? Let’s look at how we got here, starting with a brief history of how the current project came to be, and think about where we should be going.
This map from “The Rapid Transit Plan for the Metropolitan Seattle Area”, 1970, highlights the topographic difficulties facing any project to connect West Seattle to Downtown. Image clipped from a scan shared by Bruce Englehardt on Reddit.
Sound Transit has another online open house up, now with more details on station locations and elevation. We’ve covered the alignment alternatives in previous posts, so let’s focus on the stations. Two notes to start with: first, if you like mezzanines, you are in for a treat! Second, opening dates are pushed out past 2035 due to COVID, though that could slip further pending reprioritization discussions at the board level.
Links go directly to station images or pages where appropriate.
Most savings will require extending the construction window over several more years than originally planned (slide: Sound Transit)
Over the lifetime of the ST3 program, Sound Transit now expects a revenue shortfall on the order of $8-12 billion. Without adjusting expenditures, the agency will run out of available debt capacity by 2028. On Wednesday afternoon, a Board workshop learned more about the depth of the financial crisis and began to review options for responding. On average, according to one board member, the financial outlook suggests a five-year delay to projects not already in construction.
Generally, staff are suggesting extended project timelines. (They were careful not to couch this as a recommendation). In this scenario, environmental and preliminary engineering (E/PE) work might begin on the original schedule, but detailed design and construction work would follow over a longer window than currently projected. E/PE work is relatively inexpensive, typically about 10% of project costs. Getting it done on schedule preserves flexibility in case new revenue or grant options present themselves.
A number of board members raised the possibility of asking voters to raise the debt limit. Similar to municipalities, Sound Transit can borrow up to 1.5% of the assessed value of properties within the RTA. That could be raised to 5% of assessed value with the approval of 60% of voters. There was interest too among some board members in raising taxes or changing the mix of taxes supporting the agency. For now it would be unsafe to rely on that. Any such ballot measure is further in the future than Sound Transit should wait before acting.
Projects already in construction will be prioritized. Others go in the realignment process (slide: Sound Transit)
A series of meetings this week will select criteria for Sound Transit’s program realignment. A Board workshop will be held on Wednesday. On Thursday the Executive Committee expects to recommend evaluation criteria for projects to be altered or delayed. On June 25, the full Board is to approve those criteria before a further series of meetings evaluates what is to be done with each project.
The most current recession scenarios, shared with the Board last Thursday, predict a sales tax loss of 26%-31% this year and 27%-35% in 2021. That’s compounded by lost fare revenue, but also offset partly by $166 million in CARES Act assistance.
Added up, the current revenue loss expectation is for $743-$953 million through the end of next year alone. The model appears to anticipate a long recession with revenues persistently below past projections after the pandemic has passed.
The original genius (or sin, if you prefer) of the legislation that created Sound Transit was that it yoked together the region’s high capacity transit needs. The suburbs and the cities had to work together to get what they wanted, or no one would get anything, like a municipal prisoner’s dilemma.
The West Seattle – Ballard link extension (“WSBLE” in Sound Transit’s lingo) is pushing that 25-year-old decision to its limits. Pierce and Snohomish County reps want WSBLE to be fast and cheap, lest it jeopardize the extensions to Tacoma and Everett (to some of them, WSBLE it isn’t part of the “spine,” so the whole thing is a kind of agency scope creep anyway). Seattle reps, meanwhile, are hearing an earful from their voters and maritime interests about elevated alignments at the termini. These reps also know that without the votes from Seattle’s west side neighborhoods, there might not have been enough support to get ST3 over the finish line to begin with, and certainly not enough money to support Snohomish’s speculative and expensive detour to Paine Field.
The draft ST3 plan in March 2016 extended rail beyond Lynnwood in two steps. The first, in 2036, would bring service to North Lynnwood, serving stations at West Alderwood Mall, Ash Way, and Mariner. The second, in 2041, extended around the SW Everett Industrial Center (Paine Field) and north to Everett Station.
When the plan was finalized two months later, the extensions were combined so the Paine Field and Everett stations would open five years earlier. It was a telling decision that all the extra financial resources of the final plan were put into the northern segment. This looks like an error. While all parts of Everett Link have their value, the immediate rider needs are mostly between Lynnwood and Mariner.
Aerial view of a potential OMF site at S 344th St in Federal Way. I-5 and the old Weyerhauser campus are in the background (Google)
The Sound Transit board will likely vote on Thursday not to include a controversial Federal Way Kent site on its short list for a South Sound maintenance base. The system expansion committee voted unanimously on May 9 to remove the site, which hosts several auto-oriented retail businesses including a newly-opened Dick’s Drive-In. It was controversial not only because of the popular fast food chain, but because it would have limited transit-oriented development (TOD) opportunities within the walk shed of a future Link station at Highline Community College.
We wrote about the site and the challenges of another controversial site, the nearby Midway landfill, back in January. Since then, ST has been narrowing sites for consideration. The Kent Reporter, which has had excellent coverage of the maintenance base issue, notes that we’re down to three sites:
Midway Landfill, west of Interstate 5, which has been closed since the 1980s and is owned by Seattle Public Utilities. Estimated cost: $1.3 billion
South 336th Street near I-5, which is the location of the Christian Faith Center church in Federal Way. Estimated cost: $750 million
South 344th Street near I-5, which is an industrial area in Federal Way, includes several businesses: Garage Town, which offers private custom storage facility; an RV storage facility; and Ellenos Yogurt Factory. Estimated cost: $800 million
At the time of the 2016 ballot, ST has assumed that the OMF would be located “in the Federal Way to Tacoma corridor.” Last spring, however, the agency came to realize that the facility would be needed in service by 2026 in order to be ready for the West Seattle link extension, per Scott Thompson, a ST spokesperson. That means placing it further north, either within the Federal Way extension (opening 2024) or very close by, in such a way as to “avoid pre-determining the location of the South Federal Way station.”
The decision to remove the Dick’s site was a good one. While it’s hard to imagine a more anti-TOD business than a drive in restaurant, politics makes strange bedfellows. If the presence of Dick’s today makes it easier to protect a future TOD development site down the road, so be it.
Of the sites remaining, Midway is estimated to cost half a billion more than the other two sites (for context, a West Seattle tunnel is pegged at $700m). While it may seem convenient to raid ST’s bank account to pay for toxic clean up (as Federal Way’s mayor has suggested), surely that money could be used more wisely for actual transit. I’m no expert on brownfield redevelopment, but reading the EPA’s Superfund page about the landfill makes me want to think twice about locating an employment center there.
Fortunately, there seems like an obvious solution. The site at 344th & I-5 scores the best on Sound Transit’s scorecard (see p. 53 of this technical analysis). A collection of low slung auto-oriented buildings across the street from a Walmart, it’s far enough from a station not to interfere with future TOD opportunities. And the price is right, too.
Letters from businesses, government agencies, and community groups show a citywide desire for the West Seattle and Ballard Link extensions to be almost entirely tunnels.
Troublingly for Sound Transit, businesses on the Duwamish Waterway made conflicting demands about where to build the bridge that will cross the river mouth, which means a costly legal fight to acquire right of way is likely.
That cost could come from several scenarios that would drive expensive litigation and mitigation. The first is a contentious Duwamish crossing, with legal and condemnation battles fought against the Port, maritime businesses, and industrial concerns. The second is a similar fight over land and right of way with neighborhood groups and residents, if their tunneling preferences are ignored.
On the third hand, if the agency does follow public opinion and put trains underground, engineering costs could spike dramatically. In that scenario, Sound Transit would need to either find new sources of revenue (such as the City of Seattle or the Port), find significant cost savings (as occurred with U-Link), or some combination of both.
The northern terminus of the planned Issaquah-South Kirkland line in 2041, and one candidate for a future extension in ST4 (Image by author)
Although we are early in the ST3 program, some observers are already looking forward to extending Link light rail lines into the suburbs and adding more lines in Seattle. The ST3 plan funds severalstudies of suburban extensions. Current taxes do not support further expansions at the pace of ST3, however. Unless Sound Transit secures another large tax increase, capital spending beyond ST3 will be mostly squeezed out by the costs of managing what has already been built and financing the bonds accumulated in ST3.
The budget for future projects is constrained by Sound Transit’s tax authority. Sound Transit levies nearly all the taxes currently permitted by the Legislature; the only unused authority is a small rental car tax. Any prospect of further authority is hard to forecast. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine today’s Legislature granting more tax authority. Many legislators were unhappy about how the ST3 program far outran the smaller 15-year program they anticipated in 2015, and high car tabs remain unpopular. On the other hand, fifteen years is a long time in politics, and a new generation of legislators in the 2030s may take a sunnier view.
But let’s suppose we are limited by current law, or equivalently that voters resist new taxes. In that scenario, Sound Transit might ask voters in the waning years of the ST3 program to authorize more projects with an extension of current taxes. How much could Sound Transit build with voter approval if they just roll the current law taxes forward indefinitely? Less than you might expect. It turns out that a capital program extended to 2060 would have a run rate perhaps only a third as large as the 2016-2041 program.
