No traction on transportation

Legislators can’t advance possible solutions to three-county authority

JOSEPH TURNER; joe.turner@thenewstribune.com
Last updated: February 17th, 2008 01:28 AM (PST)

But lots of marriages have rocky times, and key members of the Legislature aren’t willing to let the counties divorce and go their separate ways – at least, not yet.

“We really do think there needs to be a cooling-off time,” Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said Saturday during a debate on the floor of the state Senate in Olympia.

Haugen, a Camano Island Democrat, was urging her colleagues to pass Senate Bill 6771, a measure that would prohibit the three-county Regional Transportation Investment District from putting another tax package on the ballot any sooner than 2009. It was a meaningless bill because it was telling the three counties not to do something they weren’t going to do anyway.

What the bill does is buy time. It gives leaders in the three counties one more year to talk about overhauling the way they choose and pay for huge state transportation projects, such as the $4.4 billion Highway 520 bridge replacement and the $2 billion extension of Highway 167 in Pierce County.

It gives them time to do what Haugen really wants: choose a regional transportation czar who has the power to overrule parochial squabbles and stop local leaders from spreading money out to so many small projects that none of the big ones ever gets built.

“That’s why everyone hates it,” Haugen said. “They see it as a threat to their turf.”

Pierce County officials are one group that feels threatened by a regional transportation authority. They fear such an organization would be dominated by Seattle and King County. That’s why Pierce County officials want the option to create their own countywide transportation authority.

Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, said he collected support for such a measure, but Haugen wouldn’t let the Senate Transportation Committee vote on it. Haugen didn’t have enough support for her own proposal, SB 6772, either. So it also appears to be dead. Haugen wanted to turn over highway planning and funding in the three Puget Sound-area counties to Sound Transit, the 12-year-old, three-county organization that already is building a bus-and-rail system in the region.

The result is a legislative stalemate.

The Senate did pass the one-year moratorium on a highway project vote on a 27-22 vote, though the entire Pierce County delegation voted against it.

Kastama said Pierce County could craft its own list of highway and transit projects and ask for approval of taxes only in Pierce County, but Haugen won’t let that proposal go forward.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and some business and labor leaders in the Puget Sound region also want to keep the three counties together and use a regional approach to big projects. But it doesn’t appear there will be any substantive change in regional transportation governance in this legislative session.

The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn March 13.

Joseph Turner: 253-597-8436

blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics

Originally published: February 17th, 2008 01:28 AM (PST)