Aaron Reardon wants to join Ron Sims in the “Politicians who will never become Governor” club:
Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon and Edmonds City Councilwoman Deanna Dawson, who both serve on the transit board, said they oppose the 12-year plan, partly because it doesn’t bring light rail to Snohomish County.
“I will vote no on it,” Reardon said. “I will actively campaign against it.”
This is why “regionalism” will always fail. King County voters want transit and are willing to tax themselves to get more of it. The nature of Sound Transit’s governance structure makes it necessary to seek Reardon and Dawson’s approval for King County voters to tax themselves for transit. The problem is, the Seattle sub area doesn’t have the tax capacity to build enough light rail to reach their sub area to the north. So unless Snohomish County wants to spend their money building light rail outside their sub area, they won’t get light rail soon.
This highlights the flaws of sub area equity. Expensive projects are slowed because we don’t have flexibility to spend money where it should be spent. Imagine if a massive freeway overpass project in Yakima couldn’t be built because their taxing authority was too narrow? They wouldn’t stand for it, and they would expect, as they always have expected, that parts of the state that pay more in transportation taxes than they receive (hello city folks!) would subsidize their overpass. We do this in our Department of Highways, but it’s impossible to do when paying for transit. This makes no sense.
Starry-eyed regionalists in the legislature (hi Rep. Deb Eddy!) who want to dilute King County’s urban transit-loving majorities should watch Aaron Reardon in action. This guy really knows how to throw the brakes on.
[H/T Seattle Transit Blog]
Why would anyone expect them to support a flawed plan cobbled together for political reasons that does nothing for the community they were elected to serve?
I don’t think the problem is so much with sub-area equity, as with inclusion of Snohomish County in the ST district. They don’t have enough of a tax base to do any big capital projects, but have enough voters to muck it up for everybody else.
@ 1
What they want (light rail) isn’t going to happen without raising the sales tax by more than half a percent. Or, without screwing over another part of Sound Transit’s sub area like the south link.
As for “political”… That’s nonsensical. Something is political to everyone. Everything is political to someone.
@ 2
I like riding the Sounder north with the guys from your blog that one day, but…
It only reminded me how the Mayor of Everett campaign against Sound Transit in ’94, helping to kill it, because light rail didn’t go all the way to Everett. Short sided as fuck.
Everett isn’t even the third largest city in WA.
Not every elected official in Snohomish County is as parochial as Reardon and Dawson. There’s at least one in Lynnwood who would happily send Snohomish County money south first, to get light rail extended up the county line, as long as King County money was available afterward to build it into Snohomish County.
This is called regionalism. It’s the traditional way rail transit has been funded — suburban dollars flow inward in early years, to build the expensive core system, and then city dollars flow outward in later years, to build the extensions into the burbs. Over time, real equity is achieved.
But unfortunately, the Lynnwood guy isn’t on the Sound Transit board. And ST’s policy of shortterm “subarea equity” nearly cripples genuine regionalism.
Sadly, nearsighted complainers like Reardon and Dawson may carry the day.
Light rail will take too long to reach their turf? so delaying construction a few more years will get it there sooner? Like my mom used to say, not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Roger Rabbit @ 1
Short, sweet, succinct and to the point. And 100% correct.
Dang. I gotta agree with Roger on this one…
@3 “As for ‘political’… That’s nonsensical.”
I respectfully disagree. Sound Transit is doing nothing to fix light rail’s flaws. But that’s not surprising given that ST’s board consists of politicians not engineers. Nor is it surprising that a board of pols is totally focused on coming up with a strategy to pass light rail at the polls, instead of worrying about engineering a system that deserves to pass at the polls. ABsolutely nothing has changed in terms of cost, design, route, or financing. The only thing ST has proposed to do is repackage Phase 2 so voters will pass it. No engineering, just sheer politics.
Shout-out back at you, Will. If you ever want to talk about how to get more transit out in the ‘burbs … faster … let me know.
RR@1 is correct … flawed plan, doesn’t deliver the LOS we desperately need. Reardon, Dawson are correct – this isn’t a good proposal.
The BETTER question is … what next?
Sound Transit is to transit as Sound Politics is to politics.
Deb @9,
Will can speak for himself Deb, but at this point I couldn’t care less about getting more transit out in most of the ‘burbs. It may not be very politic of me to say so, but I’m just fed up with suburban politicians, business people and wealthy anti-transit ideologues holding Seattle’s transportation future hostage.
What I want is for the Legislature to get off our backs and give local communities the adequate taxing authority to build what we want locally. A local option sales tax on gasoline. Higher MVET and weight fees. Hell… a goddamn income tax. And no bullshit subarea equity. Let local voters decide if they want to tax themselves to build the transit system we want, while Kemper Freeman Jr. mouths off into the empty void of space.
That’s my answer to your question.
Give us a taxing district encompassing Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond, with adequate taxing authority, and I guarantee you voters will choose to expand light rail. Or is that what everybody is afraid of?
How many times does the ST board have to hear Hell NO before they finally get it……
Will and Transitguy,
You are ignoring the fact that subarea equity was a major selling point of the campaign to form and fund ST in the beginning. It was great when it suited ST’s purpose (getting votes outside King County) but now it’s “parochial” to insist that the plan actually provides the equity that was promoted by ST and approved by voters? You ST boosters have a pretty short or selective memory.
And Goldy, your rant is pretty lame. Or maybe you are ignorant of the importance that was placed on subarea equity for oh about the last decade or so? Your ST boosters only supported it when it could buy you some desperately needed votes.
Typical BS from you urban lefties: make a bunch of promises to the “trailer trash” in the suburbs in order to buy their votes and then 10 years later rant about how stupid and unfair those promises were.
A final thought that you idiots must attempt to understand: the suburban trailer trash are paying the same ST taxes that the uber intelligent urbanites are.
Will, you mean Snohomish Donkey Aaron Reardon doesn’t walk the King County Moonbat! Donkey walk? Well why should he? Oh you mean he should kow tow to the wishes of the 16%ers?
I met the man. Even though he’s Donkey and I’m not a kool-aid drinker, his opposition to King County Monnbat!tism is refreshing… Someone looking out for his constituents.
Waaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa haaaa
Delbert: I have said many times there are TWO topics you can trust Pelletizer on, Sound Transit and Law.
I know he, GBS and Cynical discuss stocks and their investments.
For example his treatises on Haiti, the meaning of IF, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Hanging Chads, etc. are another story.
I used to ignore him otherwise! Now I have fun at his expense.
Oh, yes, I’m waiting to view the next pithy comment on this entry.
Goldy @11:
For what it’s worth, I thought sub-area equity was an awful compromise back in the mid-90s, still think so today, would love to see it repealed. But as noted by a few posts here, it was seen as necessary to the initial authorization of an RTA, and it’s still an article of faith for many.
While sharing your utter frustration with this situation, I do NOT see it as ideologically easy as you do. The legislature did substantially what you’re asking in giving us the vehicle of the RTA (now ST), but they did it with a now-unpopular revenue source (again, sales tax wasn’t uniformly thought to be a great idea at the time). And now, 12 or so years later, we find that we have different expectations of “transit” and different views about funding.
At the risk of being redundant: I am firmly, completely pro-transit and pro-light-rail. But there are questions about VALUE here that worry many of us. We’re not being contrary just for the hell of it, Goldy. Money, once spent, cannot be retracted and re-spent. So these billion-dollar decisions do matter.
Zip @13, it was at the Lynnwood community meeting a few weeks ago that Sound Transit heard the most support for regional funding of light rail extension to Snohomish County. Most of the folks there recognized the box that “subarea equity” puts us in, and they recognized the value of sending Snohomish dollars south to extend light rail to the county line, in exchange for King County dollars later coming north to build the line on to Lynnwood.
At the time of the 1996 vote, Subarea Equity was created not to enhance appeal to the region’s voters but rather to satisfy the parochialism of small-minded boardmembers. The irony is that regional funding achieves Subarea Equity over time, just not in the one-year-at-a-time timeframe of certain boardmembers.
“My way or the Highway” is, sadly, the mindsent we’re dealing with here, and it could actually kill the best opportunity we will have in the next decade to expand rail transit.
The issue is not the cost of moving ahead, it’s the cost of NOT moving on this vital project. Twenty years from now, do we want our children to look at us and say: You had the guaranteed highest turnout election in a generation, and you had gasoline at unprecedented high prices, and you FAILED to put rail transit extensions on the ballot, to give people a choice about our transportation future? How could you have been so absolutely stupid?
Does opposing the 12 year plan necessarily mean opposing the 20 year plan? The latter would bring light rail to Ash Way/164th, and was the most popular option in ST’s surveys.