I work for the Port of Seattle, and am responding on behalf of Commission President Bill Bryant. Mr. Valdez says that Commissioner Bryant claimed that not digging the tunnel would be "municipal suicide." In fact, what Commissioner Bryant said is that to tear down the viaduct and not replace it would be municipal suicide - an important distinctiont that Mr. Valdez ignores. Tens of thousands of jobs and millions in business and state and local tax revenues depend on a transportation system that can move goods and people efficiently not just around our area, but in and out of Seattle and across the state.

Other regions would dearly love to have a thriving port that drives economic growth, and that makes the investments needed to keep jobs and businesses. For 100 years, Seattle and our port has made those investments. Let's continue investing in a sustainable, job generating future.

Charla Skaggs, Port of Seattle

While I'm sorry you haven't found a new job yet, I'm happy you've made use of all the extra free time to submit more of these amusing pieces - it livens up Crosscut to see someone claim the progressive mantle while copying admiringly from the playbook of Reagan/Bush phrasemaker Peggy ("Read My Lips: No New Taxes") Noonan.

Once you've got work again we may see fewer of these, and good for you, but Crosscut will be a less wacky place.

Among many Seattle area transportation advocates, it has been a tenet of faith that the light rail program will lead to the urbanist benefits tagged as transit oriented development or TOD. Indeed, it often seems that hoped for TOD benefits have weighed more heavily in the advocacy for some elements and locations of the light rail program than the very modest benefits (if any) that can be claimed for light rail as contrasted with much cheaper improved bus services for the actual transit purpose of conveniently and cost-effectively moving people.

One of the areas elsewhere that has invested in a significant light rail program (probably better balanced with a full range of transit modes than has been the course in the Puget Sound area) is Salt Lake City. Recently I heard the internationally well-regarded director of the Utah Transit Authority (one transit agency in Salt Lake City, not several as here in Seattle) point out that light rail should only be expected to produce TOD benefits if land use regulation and neighborhood receptivity are in place to support significantly higher density. Light rail transit by itself will not provide a TOD elixir. Light rail investments should not be made on mere hope that the other necessary conditions of denser development will necessarily follow.

Transit oriented development in relation to Sound Transit’s light rail program is proving to be a very sporadic and elusive object. Of course, it can be argued that it’s still early in the game. Many of the real estate developers who hold potentially valuable parcels (and have been big and financially generous promoters of TOD theology; it’s interesting when developers are seen as our “friends” as in the TOD discussion as contrasted to when they are the “enemy” as in “wouldn’t crass developers benefit from a resplendent Seattle waterfront?”) are still hoping to reap their TOD payouts. But TOD itself has made no appreciable dent in the demography of the region, although other strategies for denser development do show occasional bright results. See Ballard, downtown Kirkland and downtown Renton, for example.

The disappointments of TOD and the obstacles to achieving what many view as its promises – still to be honestly assessed in quite a complicated variety of specific situations – should become a much larger element in the discussion of how we want pressure and scarce transit taxes to be spent. Transit taxes are high in our region. How we spend them is critically important. Is the main object to attempt to provide development incentives for a very narrow set of locations? Or should the object be transit service and its benefits delivered more broadly, both by geography and community, to meet pressing needs for mobility?

From a comment at the top of this thread:

“It is the citizens that voted for a light rail system that is so expensive (many many times the cost of the waterfront tunnel) that it will never pay its way.”

Don’t try blaming the voters for the abusive financing plan the appointees comprising Sound Transit’s board are putting together. It was designed by the self-interested lawyers who make huge money off the excessive taxing and bond-selling that taxing district wants to do.

The main problem with transit around here is that it is managed poorly, particularly with respect to the financing plans. The tax cost to the public is FAR higher here than elsewhere. That’s not the fault of “the citizens”; it is due to unfair ballot measures that self-interested groups promote.

The key factor driving Sound Transit’s bloated, punishing taxing plans is the way it pledges to collect its entire tax streams at or near the maximum rates while any of its 40-year bonds are outstanding. Sound Transit’s plan is to sell about $8 billion in long-term bonds. So far it has sold about $1.4 billion of debt. That is a massive amount of local bonding. It will be securing that mountain of debt by pledging in the bond sales contracts to confiscate about $85 billion in taxes, through 2052 or so. Those tax-collection pledges are the security for the bondholders.

That's a uniquely abusive use of taxing powers. No peer of Sound Transit’s uses that kind of punishing financing scheme to pay for buses and trains - anywhere else in the country. ST’s tax collection pledges will cause it to confiscate billions of dollars more tax revenue than it needs.

Metro, Sound Transit, and the transit governments in Pierce and Snohomish counties, and the emergent SDOT transit agency expect to haul in something on the order of $1.3 billion in local tax revenue this year alone. All their peers do a great job of providing bus service, and expanding train systems, with far less annual local tax revenue:

- TriMet (Portland) - $233 million;

- DART (Dallas/Fort Worth) - $385 million;

- San Diego Metropolitan Transit System - $100 million; and

- RTID (Denver) - $241 million.

There is no good reason for this discrepancy. Maybe Doug MacDonald – who was on Sound Transit’s board when this abusive financing plan was sent to voters – could explain why that monumentally regressive taxing and bond-selling plan was given to voters when no peer uses anything like it.

Not only is there far too much taxing for transit here, it is the wrong kind of taxing. That 1.8% aggregate sales tax for transit here, plus car tab taxes and Metro’s property tax, are designed to target individuals (for the most part). That’s exactly what we don’t need now. Sales taxes act as an anchor on consumer spending, and it is consumer spending that pulls areas out of recessions. We’ve got the most regressive tax scheme in the country here and that’s in large part due to transit taxes. Those harm the interests of the overwhelming majority of people.

TriMet serves three counties around Portland. It only needs about $230 million in local taxing each year to provide expanding bus and rail systems and services to roughly the same population as King Co. and the ST taxing area. The TriMet financing plan imposes taxes on businesses directly. The average family there pays $0 in direct taxes for transit each year. The way it was designed up here though is nasty: Sound Transit and Metro taxes cost the average family of four here $455 every year, and that amount is set to increase for decades. Again, you can not blame “the citizens” for this abusive financing plan the governments’ leaders authorized and promoted.

There’s an economics principle called the multiplier effect. Money spent locally sloshes around many times in the local economy. Not enough of that happens here. Consider how much of the regressive tax revenue confiscated for “transit” is lost to the local economy, immediately. Sound Transit can’t ship sales tax revenue out of the local private sector fast enough. It makes huge payments to bondholders, non-local contractors, and engineering firms. Vast sums are sent to BNSF and Amtrak. Oversees contractors get hundreds of millions of dollars for railsets and tunnel boring machines. The size of ST’s payments to entities such as other local governments, state governments, and indirectly to unions are staggering – far larger than its peers make.

Local small businesses can not afford to hire new employees. New businesses will open elsewhere, where the private sector spending is more robust. This dynamic will continue for decades, and get worse and worse.

Those staggeringly poor features of transit governance flow from bad management and bad laws. Upzoning around rail stations will not offset the harm caused to the finances of hundreds of thousands of families and the local economy due to the staggeringly bad design of the financing plan for buses and trains here.

In the first three months of 2011, LINK had 1.65 million boardings. That works out to about 18,363 per day or about 9,184 people who ride it twice a day (to and from work). I'm aware there are a number of assumptions that could be incorrect in that math, but it is basic enough to use it as a starting point.

The Roosevelt rezone will add 2,000 new residents to the area directly adjacent to the transit station. Since these people will be living in TOD and only "15 minutes from downtown", the urbanists will have us believe that all who move there will be using LINK.

This will swell daily riders on LINK from 9,184 people to 11,184 people, an increase of nearly 22%.

By the time LINK gets to Roosevelt, there will be 16 stops. Roosevelt neighbrohood residents planned their stop, which represents 6% of the stops on LINK, to add 22% of the ridership by virtue of the added density.

Explain again how this "isn't enough"?

It's not the citizens who have failed at the polls; it is the media for not providing accurate information. The citizens have done well with the information provided but time and again the real details are hidden from the public. Only during the 4th vote on the monorail did we learn of the true cost of the monorail. Only recently has the local electorate learned that there are no downtown exits for the proposed waterfront tunnel.

One reason seattle citizens are known to use the initiative process is because then and only then can they frame the debate in an open and honest way. To often the media does slack reporting amounting to regurgitated press releases from the power brokers. So the public is often fooled on the first vote but they learn their lesson and reject the mega-project and its false assumptions in the following vote(s). What else can you expect when the 4th estate is nothing but a front for big business and big government.

Croosrip. I find your oft-repeated position very interesting and always forcefully expressed. With some of it I agree and with some of it I don't. But a small point of personal privilege, since you never seem to miss the opportunity to work my personal culpability into the argument. As state secretary of transportation,I was an ex officio member of the Sound Transit board of directors from 2001 until 2007. I was not on the Sound Transit board of directors that developed the so-called ST2 plan that was sent to voters in 2008 and indeed the Crosscut archives contain three highly skeptical articles about the ST2 plan that I wrote in mid 2008. So leave me out of this, please.

While one has to wonder about the sanity of someone whose idea of fun is to plow word-by-word through the land use provisions of the Seattle Municipal Code, Valdez nonetheless raises some important issues. McDonald is surely right when he points out light rail alone can't produce an orderly land use outcome; a co-ordinated regulatory framework with appropriate financial incentives is also required. What this vacuum underscores is simply the fact that Sound Transit has always been an unwieldy multi-jurisdictional monstrosity, without any overarching core vision to guide its development implications.

It also helps to understand that in our bleak and contentious post-modern times elected officials are leaders only in the most nominal sense. In order to survive politically what they really do is follow, not lead. So any effective plan for change will need to be generated on a popular level, achieve a broad consensus and then be presented as a complete package to our compliant elected elites, who will be happy to fall into line once they determine it's safe to do so.

The author keeps returning to a simplistic theme: density will cure light rail’s ridership problem and decision makers are not providing it. I’m doubtful that any amount of factual evidence will change the author’s subjective opinion that “The problem in Seattle and elsewhere is that local electeds are failing to provide increases in zoning that will lead to the kinds of concentration of housing and jobs around transit that make the investment in light rail worthwhile.” But here goes.

He needs to start by perusing the City’s website that has detailed documentation of the comprehensive light rail station area (TOD) planning (initiated by legislative action and supported by public involvement) that started more than a decade ago:

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/ppmp_sap_home.htm

He needs to bone up on on-going efforts to update plans for several station areas, including those in southeast Seattle.

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Planning/Neighborhood_Planning/Overview/default.asp

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/ppmp_sets.htm

And he needs to understand that the market plays a huge role in the complex mobility/land use equation, and that government policy makers can’t force people, developers, and businesses to conform to some ideal urban pattern. Even when they upzone to provide substantial amounts of both residential and commercial development capacity. Even when they try mightily as they did to discourage auto dependency by adopting the “Prohibited Uses” ordinance for Station Area Overlay districts. Parking is restricted and a wide range of uses, including drive-in businesses, are prohibited.

http://clerk.seattle.gov/~scripts/nph-brs.exe?s1=station+area&s3;=&s4;=&s2;=&s5;=&Sect4;=AND&l;=20&Sect2;=THESON&Sect3;=PLURON&Sect5;=CBORY&Sect6;=HITOFF&d;=ORDF&p;=1&u;=%2F%7Epublic%2Fcbory.htm&r;=5&f;=G

Doug MacDonald writes: "I was not on the Sound Transit board of directors that developed the so-called ST2 plan that was sent to voters in 2008 and indeed the Crosscut archives contain three highly skeptical articles about the ST2 plan that I wrote in mid 2008. So leave me out of this, please."

Doug MacDonald was on Sound Transit's board when the "Roads & Transit" measure was approved in 2007. It contained exactly the same kind of uniquely abusive financing plan as ST2. In particular:

- it contemplated the collection of billions of dollars of regressive tax revenue more than would be needed for reasonable capital and operations costs;

- it would not have leveraged federal and state grants effectively (the way virtually every other light rail-building government does it); and

- that 2007 measure also contained absolutely no taxpayer-protection provisions.

He was a voting member of that board when it rubberstamped that bad 2007 financing plan, and that was the same plan used for ST2. That is why he personally is responsible for what we are living with now. Moreover, nothing in Doug MacDonald's 2008 Crosscut pieces either pointed out why the financing plan for ST2 was abusive or explained how the peer regions finance transit in ways that are far fairer to people. What he took exception to in those pieces is not important in the big picture.

Special interests and elected officials have sole responsibility for sacrificing the most common-sense approach to the AWV corridor. Everyone involved with the project knows that a refurbished or rebuilt viaduct is the preference of tax paying voters as well as many transportation professionals who must remain silent to protect their positions.

No other proposed configuration for the AWV matches the existing viaduct in any transportation related category. The rights of ways already exist. The configuration already can handle 110,000 vehicles a day. It already provides a bypass for downtown and off ramps for the core, Ballard and West Seattle. It already meets the demands for commercial vehicles. It can incorporate modern seismic protections and other enhancements for noise abatement, bikes, pedestrians and aesthetics. It provides the only effective way to modulate traffic in the core. And it’s billions of dollars cheaper than this present tunnel/park mistake that doubles the cost while increasing congestion and eliminating the only bypass that exists for the downtown core.

The tunnel isn’t even the same thing. It doesn’t follow the same route. If you have a pencil and a map you'll discover that we are being asked to spend billions of dollars to provide an expensive little “back way” into Seattle Center and South Lake Union. I wonder who benefits from that?

Regional commuters be damned...terrible idea, and a giant step backwards for Seattle.

I'm having a hard time understanding how "Tax Increment Financing" is any different from the housing speculation bubble that kicked off this financial panic in the first place.

Troops:

On the tunnel, y'all are just going to have to sort it out. Personally, your so-called vote this fall looks pretty meaningless, with no legally binding effect.

What I find unhelpful are all the knee jerk assumptions, especially by Mr. Valdez. Tax increment financing has been used successfully in some states. In others, it has been used to favor people who are already rich and powerful enough.

In any case, the Legislature cannot "just pass TIF", as if it would be easy. You have to amend the WA ST Constitution. To get there, you need a two-thirds vote in both houses.(The two -thirds requirement was recently
re-imposed by I 1053. Sixty-five of State voters voting YES.) THEN you need voter approval.

When voters repealed the MVET, Transit suffered the most. No one particularly likes more sales tax, but it is what voters, in local jurisdictions, have been WILLING TO APPROVE.

The 18th Amendment to the State Constitution requires that gas taxes be spent on roads, including the Ferries. Passed by Initiative in 1949. You cannot spend this money on transit - or light rail, or anything else.

Maybe this needs to be changed. Okay, change it! Get out there, get the signatures, get it done! But wishing will not make it so.

More revenue, more revenue, an income tax, blah, blah, blah. Mr. Valdez, if you noticed, a modest income tax proposal went to the voters in 2010. Sixty-four.15% of them said said NO. Including a majority of voters in King County.

Mr. Watson, above, gives a fair summary of other recent decisions by voters.

Government - and maybe more importantly LEADERSHIP - is the art of the possible. The POSSIBLE. Democracy is messy. Democracy is hard. Democracy means you accept the results at the polls, then re-boot and figure out a way to move forward. But you have to be able to offer more than lame pontificating.

Ross Kane
Warm Beach

True enough; Washington State leaders have blundered on tunnels, TODs and taxes, plus not admitting to these blunders. How else may they learn from their mistakes?

It's too lenient to describe transportation planning agency "mistakes" as simple blunders. Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement planning has been more like an intentional, conspiratorial, criminal act by Wsdot, SDOT and Seattle business leaders; all to maintain business as usual, to avoid short term inconvenience, to do the job cheap and dismantle union labor, to strictly establish who's the boss. It's understandably outrageous.

Sound Transit's "mistakes" in light rail planning (philosophy, not theology) may be described as incompetence. Link LRT may yet succeed with expansion; not unusual with initial LRT systems. Seattle area transit fails in how the entire system is integrated, both in TODs & in transfers between routes, not a simple prospect for a city that has been bafflingly behind the times in transportation planning for many decades.

But the DBT can only fail and MUST be rejected. Mercer West MUST be rejected. The current design for an Alaskan Way boulevard MUST be rejected.
Wsdot is most to blame for this fiasco. How fitting that a former Wsdot director would find fault only with light rail planning.

A question on TIF: if the assumption is the property value will increase, but then it turns out the overall market drops so much that even with the new amenity the total revenue is less, then what happens?

@sjenner - The city issues the bonds, so the city is always on the hook for repayment. Roger's use of TIF suggests these bonds will easily be paid back through increased property taxes. As you note, using TIF requires three things to happen:

1. The properties in the upzoned area have to be built as planned and on the planned schedule
2. The property owners will be financially able to pay the taxes
3. The difference in the value between current valuations and valuations after upzoning and building are sufficient to pay the bonds.

There's something else that needs to happen: all the growth in tax revenue can't be allocated to the TIF repayment. Some needs to be available to cover growth in other expenditures. It seems there is potential for TIF to take up "all" of the increase in revenue even if TIF has only accounted for part of the increase in revenue.

Another lively round! Crosscut will be the lesser when Roger stop asking Bateson's daughter's: "Daddy, why do things get in a muddle?".

MacDonald: "Is the main object to attempt to provide development incentives for a very narrow set of locations? Or should the object be transit service and its benefits delivered more broadly, both by geography and community, to meet pressing needs for mobility?"

The larger issue raised by the first assumption is "The Right to the City" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_the_City

Paper by that same title and other extensive work of likely its most compassionate proponent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Harvey_(geographer)

"Tax Increment Financing"

Is a plan where bond salesmen allow you to build something based on the supposed increase in value of the land around it. Goldman Sachs.. Lousiville KY stadium... and guess what, the economy sucks, the land didn't increase in value that was expected and now the taxpayers are on the hook.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/business/economy/11main.html?pagewanted=all

It's like financing a new suit to get a job and thinking you'll pay it off with your wages, but ending up at McD's and then you are in trouble.

WA state doesn't allow this sort of thing, and while I used to think it was a good way to get money to build worthwhile projects (it was explained to me by Joel Horn for the Commons Park Project, and that should have been a red flag in of itself.) And maybe it's ok with realistic property value increases, ie, put in sewers, and electricity and the land is worth more, but only if someone can afford to buy it.

But criticizing our leaders for failing failing to borrow money, well maybe that's not so bad after all.

One last comment before this blunder/mistake discussion dwindles and those responsible or loyal to reading every post has the chance for one last read:::

Louis Olay, BallardReviewNewsQuote of the day:
"The bore tunnel is the Most expensive, Least effective, done deal.".

It'll never be carbomb proof...
It'll NEVER be carboom proof...
THAT fact alone supports an uncontestable NO WAY
thumbs-down judgment on the DBT.
...
Mercer West will make actually decent-looking Mercer East worse,
And... Queen Anne much much worse...
...
Why not keep Battery Street Tunnel for its 5000 daily cross-trips?
The official DOT Plan B for reconnecting the Aurora Grid
under John, Thomas & Harrison works the same when keeping the BST.
...
See how Broad Street Underpass (BSU) works out,
before the Final decision to close it down too.
...
Alaskan Way recommendation:::
Post-seawall-+-Pre-AWV Historic Era roadway design for further study.

And do not do the deep bore tunnel.
It's NOT a done deal like the Louis Olay quote says. Go with Mike.

1. Peggy Noonan is entirely correct, folks. We have a president who is entirely non-conversant in economics, just like the majority of folks in his party.

2. Wow, good to see some names of folks I remember, particularly Ross Kane and Doug MacDonald. It's been a long while -- but nothing much seems to have changed other than the worry is about whether Washington can "do" tunnels. The concern used to be whether Washington could do bridges, floating or otherwise.

3. There's nothing magical about TIF. In 1990, I heard Jim Ellis remark to Dick Ford (the co-chairs of Booth Gardners' Growth Strategies Commission) that he believed TIF "wasn't necessary".

You can *always* borrow against future income (it's done all the time), you don't need TIF authority to do so. TIF is nothing more than corraling a specific anticipated stream of revenue -- a stream that would happen (or not) anyway following the subject public investment. But bonds sold against only that increment are much more risky than ordinary GO bonds, so TIF adds significant interest cost, in addition to the added administrative complexity. Chicago Mayor Emmanuel has announced a desire to streamline the hundreds of TIFs created there this past decade or so. Again, TIF is no magical elixir.

4. Doug MacDonald writes: "Recently I heard the internationally well-regarded director of the Utah Transit Authority point out that light rail should only be expected to produce TOD benefits if land use regulation and neighborhood receptivity are in place to support significantly higher density."

This should be a surprise? I (a non-internationally well-regarded transit director) wrote virtually the *same thing* for Sound Transit as part of a review of transit's effect on land use in 1992. But the report from Parsons Brinckerhoff-Kaiser was never published (tho' it resides as a draft in ST's library and on my harddisk), probably because it was a less-than-sanguine assessment of rail transit's ability to significant effect the region's land use patterns -- except in very narrow circumstances and where local zoning changes encourage it.

What's the lesson of all this? At the rate that the elected boards -and, for that matter, the gullible public who vote these things into existence out of our pockets- learn important lessons, you guys will be arguing over this for at least another decade. Good luck. I'm long gone -- got sick of watching the circus out there.

GaryP writes: ([TIF] was explained to me by Joel Horn for the Commons Park Project, and that should have been a red flag in of itself.)

OMG! That's a *very* valuable tidbit, Gary. Thank you for sharing.

I'll return the favor. I now live in what I call a 'Potemkinville' (at least it's not quite as oppressive here as I found Washington state, King County and Seattle had become), where the male scion of its 'ruling family' (simultaneously paternalistic and philanthropic) I've been told was a classmate & friend of Joel's at Stanford business school.

While Joel was instrumental in crafting a mess of a financial plan for SMP, his classmate & friend was crashing his family's bank writing home-equity loans in California, Nevada and Arizona. It was on the FDIC's dance-card in fall 2009.

Fancy-pants financing promoted by nincompoops will be the death of us all...

Doug Macdonald complaining about the job railer builders are doin. Yeahright.
It's unforgivable the DOT work in SeeATuLL... DBT-MercerWest Mess Part II...
Shortcomings with new ALaskan Way road concepts for Western too...

MAYOR MIKE is YOUR BEST MAYOR IN DECADES !! !! !! HEROIC !! !! HE IS RIGHT.....