The Puget Sound Regional Council
is an association of local governments and state agencies in the central Puget
Sound region of Washington State. It serves as a forum for developing policies
and making decisions about important regional growth and transportation issues.
Its objectives include “Manage and administer transportation, growth,
economic development, and data and analysis planning work programs” and
“Support the Regional Council’s Transportation Policy Board”. The PSRC FY2014-2015
budget includes $29.3 million in revenue with $15 million from federal and
state grants and $10 million from carry-over of previous grants. The
PSRC includes a staff of 19 to deal with transportation issues.
The PSRC mandate to “Support the
Regional Council’s Transportation Policy Board (TPB)” is presumably the reason
they’ve provided Sound Transit over $600 million during the last four years to
support their Prop 1 light rail extensions. The fact that the former head of the PSRC TPB,
Claudia Balducci, President Pat McCarthy, Vice President John Marchione, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson, are also members of the Sound Transit Board “may” have had some influence on
the PSRC funding.
What’s "unfortunate" is none of
the 19 transportation staff members has apparently bothered to conduct an
independent analysis of the TPB recommendations. The 8/14/14 post explains the issues involved are relatively
straight forward. Any rational
review would quickly conclude ST blundered in not adding the 4th lanes
to the I-90 bridge outer roadways some 15 years ago; closing the center roadway
would increase bridge congestion; East Link would never have capacity needed
for peak commute mass transit: and routing the 484 East Link light rail cars daily to
Lynnwood and beyond would bankrupt the areas transportation funding. In short, the PSRC is supporting TPB recommendations and ST plans that will be a disaster for the entire area.
When I referred the 8/14/14 post
to Josh Brown, the Executive Director of the PSRC and Charlie Howard, the
Director of the Transportation for PSRC the only response I received was the
following from Mr Brown:
Thanks
for passing along your thoughts. Warm regards.
Not especially encouraging.
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