A non-solution in the state transportation budget

Charles Prestrud, Washington Policy Center

In the frenzy to move legislation forward before cut-off dates dubious provisions are sometimes stuffed into must-pass bills.  There are choice examples in the State Senate’s Transportation budget bill, Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5801. The bill increases transportation taxes by about $500 million per year from a grab-bag of tax and fee increases. As you’d expect, those new taxes and fees are the focus of attention, but buried in the bill’s 132 pages are other provisions that merit scrutiny. 

For instance, Section 504 of the bill includes language that establishes “…improvements to high capacity transportation systems” as essential public facilities under the state’s Growth Management Act. The bill goes on to stipulate:

(a) No local comprehensive plan or development regulation may preclude the siting of essential public facilities.

(b) A city or county precludes an essential public facility when the city or county imposes conditions or costs that the city or county cannot demonstrate are reasonably necessary to mitigate adverse impacts directly caused by construction or operation of the essential public facility. A city or county also precludes an essential public facility when it imposes a permitting process that is too costly or time consuming for the essential public facility to reasonably comply. This subsection (5)(b) is limited exclusively to those essential public facilities that are improvements to high capacity transportation systems as defined in RCW 81.104.015.

Under RCW 81.104 light rail is considered a “high capacity transportation system”, so the bill would prevent any city or county concerned about impacts of a light rail line, station, or any of the associated facilities, from precluding such projects in local zoning codes, as well limiting their ability to obtain mitigation. That gives Sound Transit a heavy club to hold over local jurisdictions.

When the Growth management Act was being drafted the question of what constituted an “essential public facility” received a lot of attention. There was general agreement that certain public facilities, such as solid waste handling facilities were essential, but the details of how that provision of the Growth Management Act would be implemented was largely left up to a collaborative process between counties and cities. Apparently Sound Transit believes they need more explicit recognition to avoid the possibility of a city or county unhappy with a proposed light rail alignment.

Before the legislature rubber-stamps this into law they should ask whether light rail truly qualifies as “essential”.  In 2024 transit accounted for only about three percent of trips in the Puget Sound region, and light rail accounted for less than one-third of transit ridership. Is a mode of transportation that only carries about one percent of trips really essential?  Does it really justify special treatment in state law?

It might be claimed the light rail system will become essential when (if) it is finally built-out, but the Puget Sound Regional Council’s optimistic forecast indicates light rail is only expected to carry about 2% of trips in 2050. If that qualifies as essential just about any public facility would meet the standard. This makes it easy to see why the Growth Management Act left it up to cities and counties to cooperatively establish procedures for siting essential public facilities rather than empowering regional agencies or the state to make those decisions without regard to local plans and preferences.  

The funny business in ESSB 5801 doesn’t stop there. In Section 506 the bill further erodes local planning authority by stipulating:

“In the event of a disagreement over the scope of a transit project, state agencies, cities, and counties shall accept the detailed statement prepared by the transit agency under RCW 38 43.21C.030(2)(c) as the sole environmental review document, rather than conducting separate environmental reviews or preparing additional detailed statements.”  

In other words, cities and counties would have to accept whatever environmental documentation Sound Transit prepares and no additional review or analysis would be allowed. This is exactly the kind of heavy-handed top-down process the Growth Management Act’s locally led approach was designed to avoid.

These provisions, which have made their way into the proposed state transportation budget (even though they have nothing to do with state transportation taxes or state highways), seem to have been motivated by the belief Sound Transit’s considerable problems are due to interference by local jurisdictions. That belief is wrong on two counts. For starters, Seattle, where most of the system has been built, has been very accommodating from day one. The City of Seattle went so far as to enact station area overlay zoning back in 2001 and the Sound Transit plan reflects the involvement of City Hall from the inception of Sound Transit. Other cities that have, or expect, light rail extensions have incorporated it into their comprehensive plans. Yes, there have been some difficult negotiations about alignments and mitigation. That is hardly a surprise. It is the inevitable consequence of a plan that relies on light rail technology which simply isn’t a good fit for every neighborhood.

Instead of overriding the planning authority of cities and counties the legislature should address the root cause of Sound Transit’s ever-growing problems. The massive cost overruns, decades long implementation timeline, years of delay and ridership below forecasts, are primarily attributable to the choice of light rail as the mode for serving regional transportation needs. To put it bluntly, the plan has become the problem, and that won’t be solved by amending state law to enable Sound Transit to steam-roller local jurisdictions. Rather than diminishing local planning authority, the legislature needs to find ways to increase Sound Transit’s accountability.