With a 5-2 vote, the Sammamish City Council moved to oppose ST3, Sound Transit’s $54 billion 25-year transportation plan that will be put to voters this November.
Councilmembers Kathy Huckabay and Bob Keller were the dissenting votes. The council entertained not taking a stance on the issue, which was included on the Oct. 4 regular meeting agenda. Both Huckabay and Keller, as well as Mayor Don Gerend, initially expressed a desire for the council to not take a stance and leave the matter to voters.
Gerend and Huckabay both cited a lack of information on ST3 to make a decision, though Gerend later stated he had “certainly heard enough reasons tonight to see that Sammamish is not getting its fair share out of the Sound Transit 3 funding.”
“Although I would’ve loved to see our council not take a position and hope that we would have more facts come forth, either from the media or conversations with Sound Transit, it hasn’t happened,” Gerend said. “And so I’m going to vote, I will not abstain.”
Deputy Mayor Ramiro Valderrama and Councilmembers Tom Hornish and Christie Malchow all supported the council taking a stance, with each stating their opposition to ST3. Councilmember Tom Odell also stated he thought the council should take a stance before reversing that decision after each of the council members and the mayor weighed in.
Keller said while ST3 wasn’t necessarily the “silver bullet” to reduce the issue of traffic, it provided steps in the right direction toward building infrastructure more in line with the population growth that the region has been experiencing.
“There is a severe problem on the horizon that we cannot ignore, and that is Issaquah and Redmond both have high-density transit-oriented development in their Comprehensive Plan that is at the front doorstep of Sammamish,” Keller said. “Our residents are going to have to drive through the multi-family units that they have planned, not 25 years out, sooner than that. It’s at our doorstep. I want to say that we want to work with our neighboring partners, but they are going to increase the density on our commute routes.”
Huckabay said she wanted to focus on getting more Metro service in Sammamish. She said she was opposed to taking a vote on ST3 because she didn’t think the council was “as fully informed as we’d like to think.”
“We need to focus on how we help our commuters, who are looking to find efficient ways to get to work, to find those ways,” she said. “I don’t think voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on Sound Transit 3 is going to make one spit of difference on how they get there.”
While ST3 would bring light rail to Everett, Tacoma, Redmond and Issaquah, the primary return for Sammamish would be a park and ride coming to the city sometime between 2019 and 2024, a detail that came up more than once Tuesday evening.
King County Councilmember and former Bellevue mayor Claudia Balducci was on hand, on behalf of the Mass Transit Now! campaign, to speak in favor of ST3, while Bellevue City Councilmember Kevin Wallace was in attendance to speak against. Each side had 10 minutes to speak, as well as a one-minute rebuttal period.
“We know there’s a tremendous demand for transit here on the Eastside and in your community,” Balducci said during her address to council members. “We know you’ve seen the challenges of having more demand than you have service.”
Balducci stated with ST3, the Eastside will be connected by rail and bus “better than ever before, and better than anywhere else in this system.”
“The west side is getting a north-south rail with a couple of spurs,” she said. “The Eastside is getting connected from Redmond to Bellevue, from Kirkland to Bellevue, from Issaquah to Bellevue, from Bothell all the way down to Tukwila on I-405 and then across to 522.”
In his speech, Wallace was quick to sum up why Sammamish residents should oppose ST3.
“In a nutshell, this is a massive tax obligation on the people of Sammamish and you get virtually nothing out of it,” he said.
Wallace posed that a Sammamish household with a $175,000 income, $45,000 worth of cars and a $700,000 home would pay $1,112 per year to Sound Transit if ST3 passed. He said other government priorities required attention and stated levy reform discussions in Olympia pertaining to education funding were relevant to this topic, especially if the Legislature went the route of raising property taxes to fund education. Wallace said ST3’s six light rail extensions were driving the need for tax increases, noting the first of those extensions isn’t scheduled to open until 2030 and the last isn’t set to open until 2041.
“We can do a lot better by focusing on the things that we can deliver in the near term and not have this massive tax increase to cover things that don’t solve the traffic problems of today,” he said.
Wallace claimed Sound Transit numbers showed ST3 would only put 64,000 new riders on transit. His suggestions for dealing with congestion issues was extending light rail to downtown Redmond and connecting Bus Rapid Transit lines on I-405, 520 and I-90. He contended such projects would be less expensive and would pose a much lower need to raise taxes.
