Repealing car tabs tax isn't a message, it's a road to nowhere

This article originally appeared in the Puget Sound Business Journal on October 21, 2019.

I-976, an anti-transportation measure on the November ballot, reminds me of a boomerang. It’s proponent, Tim Eyman, is selling it as a way to “send a message to Olympia and Sound Transit about taxes.”

But thrown in anger, I-976 curves around and hits us all on the back of the head.

I-976 isn’t a message. It’s a huge cut to the transportation funding that our state desperately needs more of, not less. In a dozen years, Washington has grown by one million people, which is a rate of growth that has been hard to keep up with. As PSBJ reportervPaxtyn Merten noted in her story, our region’s increasing population is straining our transportation systems. We have more car and commercial traffic, and along with more public transit ridership.

This isn’t just about Seattle. Average commute times in all four Puget Sound counties (King, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap) have increased, resulting in hundreds of lost hours every year. Whether you drive or take the bus, train or ferry to work, you are likely seeing the need for more options, not less. And yet I-976 would only reduce those options and make many of them ineffective.

The projects we need take time and funding, but the public’s impatience is understandable. We wish the work were done yesterday. Some may remember that more than 50 years ago the region considered developing a mass transit rail system like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco. Voters said no and we missed our opportunity to build the system then that we need today.

We’re determined not to make that same mistake again. Voters have consistently supported increased bus service and Sound Transit’s expansion because it’s obvious that our region is not sustainable without them.

I-976 puts a $4 billion hole in the next 10 years of state transportation budgets.

If approved, large and small projects will be put on hold statewide, while the Legislature rewrites the gutted budget. Inevitably, projects will be delayed, shrunk, or outright canceled. These aren’t just expansion projects to deal with congestion, they’re huge safety projects replacing overpasses and bridges vulnerable to earthquakes.

This is where business and labor communities are most concerned. About a quarter of Washington state’s GDP is in agriculture and manufacturing. If our transportation system isn’t improved across the state, our whole economy slows down. When our roads, railways and bridges become ragged and unsafe, jobs and families suffer.

We owe our workforce a better transportation system than we have now. It’s increasingly hard to find affordable housing in good neighborhoods near good jobs. Transportation is increasingly a factor in people’s decision about where to work and live. If we can make it easier for people to move around the region, we also make it easier to attract and retain the best people. We owe it to ourselves in one of the nation’s best regions.

I-976 stops long-term infrastructure investments, and it also puts at risk many existing services. Seattle’s voter-approved Transportation Benefit District (TBD) funds 350,000 hours of city-dedicated bus service every year, and without it, many people will be forced back into their cars, making traffic increasingly worse.

Cuts to the state budget also threaten services specifically dedicated to helping our veterans, senior citizens, youth, and people with disabilities. These are people who have a 100 percent dependence on public transportation to get to school, work and home.

More than 60 cities statewide have TBDs that use local funds for local road improvements and repairs. I-976 repeals cities’ authority to use car tabs completely. It doesn’t make sense for a statewide initiative to take power away from cities. With the cuts to the state budget, there are no replacement funds.

The I-976 ballot title might sound good, but it doesn’t give us what we want and need: better roads, robust transit options, earthquake-and collision-resistant bridges and overpasses. We need to make immediate improvements, and we need to make generational investments. Please join me in voting no on I-976.