Jake: All aboard, light rail! Next stop … not Ballard

You know that scene in “Zoolander” where Will Ferrell’s villain loses his mind and screams, “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

That’s my reaction every single time Sound Transit makes the news.

After a marathon session on Thursday, the Sound Transit board voted 16-2 to approve a long-range plan that will supposedly guide which voter-approved transit projects move forward over the next 25 years. Board members called it meaningful progress. I’m calling it what it is: an elaborate can-kick.

Here’s the situation. Sound Transit now faces a roughly $34.5 billion funding gap over the next two decades — the result of many things, but certainly not unforeseeable. People predicted this for years. Many, many times.

So what did the board actually vote to do about it? Mostly: work really hard at figuring it out … someday … maybe. They named a few priorities. They reshuffled some timelines. Some promised stations and extensions could be delayed or phased in. If you were hoping for the hard decisions — cutting expensive extensions that have ballooned beyond achievable — you didn’t get them.

Sound Transit’s numbers don’t add up, but they keep going up

Let’s look at some numbers, because the numbers are staggering.

Start with that $34.5 billion shortfall. But understand that’s only part of the story. The total program cost has grown to at least $185 billion, and with approximately 3.4 million people in the district, that works out to roughly $55,000 for every man, woman, and child within the taxing boundary. That number doesn’t even include long-term debt payments stretching into the 2060s!

The shortfall alone breaks down to about $10,000 per person in the taxing district. Family of four in Snohomish County with zero plans to ride a train? Congratulations, your household’s share of the deficit alone is $40,000.

The Ballard extension, which was originally estimated at $11.2 billion, has now ballooned to more than $20 billion. And under the plan the board just approved? Ballard light rail stops at Seattle Center, a mile and a half short of Ballard itself, with no completion date to actually reach the neighborhood.

Think about that. People in Ballard have been taxed for this train since the 1990s. They voted for it. They were promised it. And now they’re being told the train stops short, the timeline is unclear, but the taxes … unlike the light rail, will certainly arrive on time.

I’d love for a legislator or a lawyer to weigh in here: Is there any mechanism to stop this? To say, we’ve done what we can with what we have — let’s freeze this where it is, stop throwing good money after bad, and stop taxing people for infrastructure they’ll never see?

Because here’s the thing. We hear constant, and justified, outrage about gas prices in this state. The increased cost because of the war in Iran, the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) tax, the pain at the pump, and real dollars that hurt real families. Those costs are real. But they’re dwarfed by what residents are being forced to pay indefinitely for a train that, for a lot of them, will never arrive.

I’m not saying transit is bad. I’m saying this particular project, at this scale, managed this way, is a fiscal catastrophe being treated like a work in progress.

And I’m still taking crazy pills.

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