Streamlining toll setting process comes with potential to eliminate public input

The Washington State Transportation Commission (WSTC) is expected to approve new toll-setting rules today. Why does that matter to you? It will increase the speed at which tolls can be set and could eliminate public comment in certain situations.

Now that most of the region’s roads have some kind of toll on them, the WSTC is expected to vote today to streamline the process and eliminate some of the red tape involved in the current process.

At its most basic, the rate-setting process takes too long and is hard to understand. There are 50 different sections in the administrative code to go through. The changes would remove most of them.

State commission set to streamline toll-setting process, add emergency provision

Here’s how rate setting works today. The commission suggests a change. There is a public comment period. The WSTC votes to make a change. There is another public comment period. The change takes effect in a month or two.

“This is effectively the work that we currently do,” WSTC financial analyst Aaron Halbert told the commission in February. “We’re just getting rid of the tail end of our current rate-setting process, where we do all this work, and then we are kind of waiting around for a month and a half before the rates can go into effect.”

Under the new rules, the commission would announce a potential change 30 days before it would take effect. Open up public comment, vote, and the changes take effect. All of this information and the process would live on the commission’s website.

“The idea here is really to make this kind of information more accessible to the public, and to make it in plain speak, so the average person can go to our website and actually understand how the rules work and the regulations and what the rates are in one spot,” WSTC executive director Reema Griffish said at the last meeting.

This change in rate-setting also includes a new emergency provision. If the legislature tells the commission that it must change a toll or a policy to meet legal or financial obligations, it could do so without public input.

“What that would allow us to do is effectively skip that public outreach process,” WSTC’s Halbert said. “The legislature directs us to do something we wouldn’t necessarily need to go through this public process. We’d be able to implement those new rates or policies immediately.”

While Halbert told the commission in February the legislature declaring an emergency would be a rarity, we have all seen how often the legislature determines things to be emergencies.

Executive Director Griffith said the rule changes should make the public feel better about the process.

“We see this as a huge improvement for public access and information gathering and transparency,” she said. “It is not a move to make things easier to happen or quicker or to bystep any kind of public process. I think we’ve actually enhanced what that public outreach will look like.”

If the rules are adopted today, as is expected, they would take effect in May.

Chris Sullivan is a traffic reporter for KIRO Newsradio. Read more of his stories here. Follow KIRO Newsradio traffic on X.

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