Kate Riley Should Go,

A newspaper whose banner includes the “Winner of 10 Pulitzer Prizes” should not have Kate Riley as its editorial page-editor.   She simply refuses to accept the reality that one of the biggest problem facing the entire area is the failure of Sound Transit and WSDOT to effectively deal with the area’s transportation problems. 

My first experience with Ms. Riley was a 2012 interview when I first ran for public office as a candidate for the 48^th District Representative.  I was asked to leave early because I persisted in my concern that the biggest problem facing the 48^th District was Sound Transit’s plan to confiscate the I-90 Bridge center roadway for an East Link light rail extension that would never have the transit capacity for future cross-lake commuters.  She was far more interested in satisfying the McCleary school funding decision.

During the next several years I referred Ms. Riley as well as several on the Seattle Times staff to hundreds of posts on this blog concerning Sound Transit’s decision to spend billions on light rail routed through a Seattle transit tunnel that severely limited its capacity.  Funds that should have been spent increasing public transit capacity with adding parking and bus routes.   She declined to even interview me when I was the King County Executive candidate in 2017.

Thus, I was somewhat surprised when asked 3 weeks ago to come to the Seattle Times on July 16^th for a 10:00 am candidate evaluation interview for the 48^th District Senate seat.  That ended around 8:15 am that morning when Ms. Riley called to inform me I was no longer going to be interviewed that morning but with a 4:00 pm phone call.  They never called and the other two candidates later told me Ms. Riley had told them I was unable to appear because of a scheduling conflict. 

However, Ms. Riley’s personal animus or mendacity  is not the issue.  It’s her failure to use the Times Opinion page to effectively influence transportation policies that affect the area.  It took until November, 2016 for the Seattle Times Traffic Lab to publicly concede the ST3 extensions would not reduce congestion.  Yet, even then, her opinion page failed to make auditing Sound Transit one of the 10 priorities for the legislature in 2017.  

The audit would have surely limited the damage, ending Sound Transit extensions beyond Northgate and Angle Lake.   They would have been forced to divert those funds to increased parking and bus service, something they’ve refused to do for years. 

Instead Sound Transit will be allowed to spend most of $54 billion on light rail extensions that do nothing to increase transit capacity into the city. That any riders the extensions add will simply displace current riders into the city.  That the increased operating costs for the extensions will either require huge increase in tolls or create a financial black hole for the area’s transportation funds.

For that she should be fired.