Sound Transit needs $34.5 billion in cost savings or new funding to deliver the ST3 expansion as promised to voters. At last week’s board retreat, staff presented three illustrative approaches for revising the capital program, each surfacing different trade-offs. None delivers light rail to Ballard. One defers the Issaquah line entirely. Under the current options, every community could have projects suspended indefinitely.
Instead of arguing for why our line is the most important and needs to be prioritized, we want to take a different approach. Cities should lead the way on offering solutions to help Sound Transit deliver rail projects faster.
In Issaquah, that starts with the basics. We want to maximize cost-effectiveness, which means maximizing ridership and minimizing cost. For example, structured parking costs nearly as much as the stations themselves, and it generates fewer riders than housing — so Issaquah is cutting new parking garages. Issaquah is also working hard to get housing built near where light rail will go. This year, we’re embarking on a major effort to streamline permitting and right-size regulations to get multifamily housing built in Central Issaquah, so that when light rail gets here, we’ll have thousands of riders waiting to get on. We are also actively working to identify a preferred alignment and station location that favors constructability and affordability, which means utilizing all the existing Washington State Department of Transportation right of way along I-90.
Then there is permitting. Sound Transit currently slogs through municipal review processes in every city it builds in. The Legislature just passed Senate Bill 6309 to let some of that work happen concurrently, and the agency says that alone could save nine months per project. But there is further to go. Giving Sound Transit more authority over its own permitting could shave years across the system. And because money is time, this could mean hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars of savings. Issaquah will show good faith by adopting self-permitting authority for Sound Transit. Every other city waiting for a station should do the same.
Cities can also help on the money side. Sound Transit’s own policy planning identifies tax increment financing districts around stations as a high-value opportunity. Even under current state limits, cities could create TIFs to fund station area infrastructure: utility work, street improvements and betterments that are a major cost driver on Sound Transit capital projects. Issaquah is willing to adopt TIF, and put our own financial skin in the game to get light rail built. We would encourage every city expecting a station to do the same.
Other cities are already doing versions of this. Redmond settled its 2 Line route early, completed public engagement upfront and had land-use changes ready. The result: Redmond’s Link extension was built before time and under budget. West Seattle found ways to bring costs down by over 30% — from nearly $8 billion down to roughly $5 billion — by dropping the Avalon station, rethinking the tunnel portal and shrinking the Sodo concourse. We should not penalize the work done to lower costs for West Seattle by having more studies and delays, but rather reward them by moving forward to construction this year. And, if we can reduce systemwide costs by 30%, that would wipe away Sound Transit’s entire fiscal hole.
In this fiscally constrained environment, the politics of Sound Transit are challenging. It’s easy to argue why our line matters more, implying that other lines matter less. But that’s counterproductive and threatens the regional approach and trust that was critical to passing ST3 in the first place. Our region deserves better. It’s time for all cities to come to the table with cost savings and a collaborative approach. Let’s build the damn trains.
