To save ST3, Sound Transit needs a lobbying strategy for securing state and federal funds to augment its local tax

dollars

In a few months, or perhaps just weeks, Sound Transit will add a fifty-first Link station to our region’s light rail system: Pinehurst. Located between Northgate and Shoreline South at NE 130th Street at the northern edge of Seattle, this infill station will likely have the distinction of being the last light rail station that Sound Transit will open in the 2020s, because no others are currently under construction anywhere in the region, despite the fact that voters approved a large expansion of light rail in every direction — north, south, east, and west — back in the 2016 presidential election.

The only ST3-funded stations that Sound Transit has succeeded in building to date have been stations that were tacked on to previously-planned and previously-approved ST2 projects: Downtown Redmond, Marymoor Village, Federal Way Downtown, and now Pinehurst, all of which will end up having opened within about a year of each other.

Stations associated with the eagerly anticipated West Seattle, Ballard, Tacoma Dome, Everett, and Kirkland-Issaquah extensions remain on the drawing board well over a decade after voters signed off on creating them.

While planning has ever so slowly inched forward, the costs for building the aforementioned extensions have jumped, repeatedly, and as a consequence, the original plan to fund them is no longer tenable. Simply put, Sound Transit doesn’t have the money lined up to deliver what its board promised to voters back in 2016, and the agency doesn’t have the means to autonomously solve these financial problems, because it only has the revenue tools that the State of Washington gives it. While the agency is looking at strategies for reducing project costs, the scale of the problem easily exceeds what can be accomplished from implementing optimizations and efficiencies.

https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2026/04/to-save-st3-sound-transit-needs-a-lobbying-strategy-for-securing-state-and-federal-funds-to-augment-its-local-tax-dollars.html