Board sticks with South Lake Union light rail station next to Aurora

Sound Transit’s governing board decided Thursday against shifting its future South Lake Union Station about 2½ blocks west toward Seattle Center.

Barring some political reversal next year, the SLU Station remains aimed for the corner of Seventh Avenue North at Harrison Street, where easy bus-to-train transfers exist with the E Line, the city’s busiest bus route serving about 12,000 daily passengers. It’s also nearer to office jobs east of Highway 99.

Thursday’s outcome was a rebuff to Vulcan Real Estate, Amazon and several businesses who warned of traffic gridlock and a threat to downtown’s fragile post-pandemic economic recovery if Sound Transit closes road lanes for eight years of light rail construction around both SLU and Denny Station sites.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell had leaned toward an alternative strategy, introduced in December, to change SLU Station to the corner of Fifth Avenue North and Harrison. He said Fifth would complement the future rebuild of Memorial Stadium for more sports and concert crowds.

He was outnumbered by fellow boardmembers who found seven years of process were enough, and they wouldn’t abide 10 additional months of environmental study to hone in on Fifth Avenue North, next to MoPOP. Doing so would have pushed the current 2039 grand opening to 2040, a staff report predicted, for a seven-mile, $11.2 billion corridor from Stadium Station to downtown and Ballard. Such delay might boost the construction budget $500 million to $1 billion to account for future inflation.

Harrell said Thursday he could “read tea leaves” and wouldn’t try to keep the Fifth Avenue version in play. “It makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think there’s any escaping the cost of delay,” he said.

Seattle’s staff will strive alongside Sound Transit to reduce traffic headaches while building the SLU station pit at Seventh and Harrison near the Highway 99 tunnel entrance, and a Denny Station pit at the hectic crossroads of Westlake Avenue and Denny Way, the mayor promised.

In a parliamentary sense, the board didn’t vote Thursday — in fact only two of 18 members attended in person at Union Station, while several others participated online. By not voting, they kept in place a 2023 preliminary vote to prefer the Seventh Avenue version, as depicted in the Sound Transit 3 tax measure of 2016.

Board members heard earlier from project-management consultant Dave Peters, who said the two versions bring similar engineering risks and construction costs. “I see fewer uncertainties and risks at Seventh and Harrison,” he said, mainly because there’s no realistic way to shrink a 10-month planning delay for new versions.

Vice-chair Kim Roscoe, mayor of Fife, said afterward new costs are always in the back of her mind, especially given that a majority of Pierce County voters opposed the 2016 measure. The nightmare scenario, often raised by Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers, is if Seattle projects pile up so much regional debt that the high-capacity transit “spine” to Everett and Tacoma can’t be financed.

Giving a nod to that backstory, Harrell said a potential $500 million increase “would put my colleagues at a disadvantage, when the city of Seattle has hopefully demonstrated its commitment to the entire Link system as passed in 2016.”

Interim CEO Goran Sparrman agreed with Roscoe that debt plus construction inflation are real risks, and his finance staff are working on a report to quantify those. Sound Transit’s budget mentions a total $148 billion to build and operate all lines from 2017-2046, when its network would cover as many miles as Washington, D.C. Metro. That doesn’t include finance payments into the 2060s.

Amazon issued this statement: “Our goal has always been to preserve and build upon the economic recovery that Seattle is making, improve the commutes of our 50,000 employees who work here, and support the dozens of local small businesses and organizations in the neighborhood that will be impacted. This decision makes it more difficult to achieve this goal. We will continue to work alongside the community to ensure that the agency provides appropriate mitigation that minimizes the effects of construction.”