Dori: Sound Transit 1 lawsuit another chance for taxpayer vindication

Sound Transit is being sued again over car tab fees — but this time, it’s over Sound Transit 1, the original 1996 package billed as Sound Move.

The attorney we had on the show recently in the Sound Transit 3 car tabs lawsuit, Joel Ard, is once again representing the group of plaintiffs. He argues that, like it did in Sound Transit 3, the agency taxed us using the wrong car valuation schedule in Sound Transit 1 — which allowed Sound Transit to overtax us by billions of dollars in the years since.

Sound Transit 1 was the original light rail plan in Seattle. It set in place the Link light rail from Northgate to Angle Lake, as well as the Sounder Train commuter rail from Everett to Lakewood. It was supposed to happen in 10 years — but it’s 23 years later, and the light rail is still not to Northgate, Roosevelt, or the U-District yet.

The CEO of Sound Transit back in 1996 was Ron Sims. Former Governor Gary Locke had an op-ed in the Seattle Times this past weekend co-authored with Ron Sims titled, “Collaboration is key to fix King County’s homeless crisis.”

If Ron Sims is part of the plan to help fix this, you’d better hold onto your bank accounts. Sims, as we know, lied to all of you on air when he told me that Sound Transit had enough money to get to the U-District from Sound Transit 1. Actually, they are tens of billions of dollars over-budget and 13 years behind schedule.

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I’ll tell you one thing. We have a chance to fix some of this with the $30 car tabs ballot measure this November, I-976. If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for your car tabs, you can get them back down to $30 by voting yes on the initiative.

Opponents are saying that the initiative will take billions from the state’s transit projects. No — the taxpayers will get to keep $4 billion more of their hard-earned money. And the politicians, who have plenty of money, will have to start prioritizing things in order of need rather than political expediency.

We should save our money and we should stop giving it to rogue, out-of-control government agencies. I guarantee you that government will always find the money it needs for major projects. It will just have to do a better job of planning and prioritizing the record revenues of tax dollars it’s already receiving. It’s that simple.

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