Dave Boze: Hoping Supreme Court finally holds Sound Transit accountable

It’s good news or bad news depending on your perspective — the Washington State Supreme Court is going to hear arguments on the lawsuit taking aim at against Sound Transit and its unfair car tab taxes. I say that it’s great news.

This is the part of the tax that inflates the value of your car over at least the first 10 years of your vehicle. Let’s say that you get yourself a used car that’s valued at perhaps $10,000 in the real world. Sound Transit will tax you as though it’s worth $15,000, however. So you’re going to end up paying a whole lot more than you should for your car tab taxes.

Sound Transit’s defense is that this valuation system was in the car tab legislation. This has been controversial since the moment these taxes came to fruition.

You have a constitutional challenge in the way that this legislation passed because when it changed the law, the rule was that you had to lay out the law that was going to be changed. This way, any citizen could examine the text of the new law, with the changes from the old law listed right beside it. You can see this any time you look up a bill on the Legislature’s website. However, that’s not the way it happened with this particular piece of legislation. And now the Washington State Supreme Court has to deal with it.

Dori: Sound Transit wins car tab suit — and will again at Supreme Court

Of course, Sound Transit keeps acting as though it is stuck with this car tab taxation formula. But there are ways that Sound Transit could have taken action to refund you some of that money. They could have shown themselves to be something other than insanely greedy for every dollar they could possibly squeeze out of you.

Now their argument is that if they lose this suit, this will be disastrous. They claim that their projects in the pipeline will be delayed. You know what? Every Sound Transit project is delayed anyway. Or it’s delayed, but they change the schedule so it looks like it’s on time. With Sound Transit, every project is delayed until it’s done — and that’s when they change the calendar to make it look like it’s on time and on budget.

I remember when Sound Transit 3 was first proposed. First they asked the Legislature for $8 billion. Then they upped it to $10 billion. They are collecting vast amounts of money, and they’re still acting as though they’re dead broke.

I recently saw a list of various jobs opening up for Sound Transit. They’ve got basically an army of public relations people. This is for an agency that is there to serve the public. What are they trying to sell? How many PR people do you need to sell a transit system?

I’m not a Sound Transit PR person, but I have a good idea of what Sound Transit should do. First, stop taking advantage of people. Second, if you would actually make some kind of effort to acknowledge and alleviate the pain that regular people are feeling from paying hundreds of dollars extra on their car tab taxes, that would show that you are responsive to your constituents’ concerns. That would go a lot farther than shaming people for driving in the first place.

By their own numbers, when everything is done, Sound Transit’s projects are not going to alleviate traffic congestion. Congestion is just going to get worse because we’re not using resources effectively. We’re operating under this kind of dream system, in which we really want people out of their cars. But even if you had some projects that were delayed, set aside, or altogether abandoned, my take is that ultimately you’d be better off by redistributing the funds to something that might actually alleviate the traffic congestion around here.

I’ve lived in the Northwest my entire life, other than my college years. Most of the highways look the same. Most of the capacity is the same. What has changed drastically is the population, which is projected to continue to grow. We went from rush hour to rush-four-hours — one set in the morning and another in the evening — and it’s only bound to get worse as more people come here.

I hope that the Washington State Supreme Court takes a long look at this lawsuit and realizes that if it’s going to go by the letter of the law, then it needs to hold Sound Transit to the letter of the law. And if the Legislature doesn’t like it, they can go back in and pass the same car tab tax again. The legislators can then explain to people why it’s fair to over-value cars.

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