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About this presentation
Thank you for viewing our presentation about Sound Transit’s promises vs. reality. This presentation was prepared by volunteers and uses data from Sound Transit and from our regional planning agency called the Puget Sound Regional Council or PSRC. The PSRC is the federally mandated agency that brings cities, counties and transit agencies together to coordinate transportation, land use and economic development plans for Kitsap, King, Snohomish & Pierce counties. They also distribute federal and state dollars to those jurisdictions. Both ST and PSRC have boards that approve policy and budgets. These board members are not directly elected but appointed. They are city and county elected officials.
Smarter Transit is made up of transit and transportation professionals, elected officials and members of the public who want to see our region thrive and grow responsibly. We support responsible investments in transit and other programs to reduce single car use and increase access, especially for folks who are transit dependent.
Most of all, we believe public agencies should be accountable to the tax paying public. We have spent over two decades examining the details of Sound Transit and PSRC’s transportation plans. This power point is a summary of what we consider the most important ways to measure what Sound Transit promised vs. what they are going to deliver, even by 2050. Again, this data comes from their documents.
Through photos and simple text in their original Sound Move Plan in 1996 in preparation for the first vote called ST1, and through subsequent votes in 2008 for ST2 and 2016 for ST3, Sound Transit pitched to the voters plans that made voters believed there would be tremendous benefits. They lowballed cost and manufactured timelines. Instead, these 3 Plans are decades behind schedule and tens of billions over budget.
To top it off, between taking tens of thousands of trees out & huge carbon footprint of all the cement they use to elevate the tracks and pollution from increased traffic we will not be able to put a dent in reducing our carbon footprint.
What is the return on our investment? You won’t find the actual ridership numbers in the Executive Summaries of the plans. They are buried in the appendices.
We’re not proposing that ST taxes can be used to fund all these needs. But until the state legislature starts holding ST accountable, cities, counties and the state will have to keep raising taxes to fund these other major needs.
We’re including a link for finding your state legislators. Your city and county webpages will have the contact info for your local elected officials: https://app.leg.wa.gov/DistrictFinder/. And this one to find your locally elected officials: https://www.lwv.org/take-action/find-your-elected-officials