> ST3 builds a ton of crap to the outer suburbs and 50 billion dollars and 20 years later it will still be a pain to get from the University District to Ballard

> ST3 builds a ton of crap to the outer suburbs and 50 billion dollars and 20 years later it will still be a pain to get from the University District to Ballard. But at least the taxpayers of Bothell will have an easy way to get to Totem Lake! That's one of the shitballs that the Washington legislature has handed us with how Sound Transit 3 works. It's called "subarea equity" and means that taxes are spent only in the area where they are gathered--areas called things like "North King," "South King," "Snohomish," and so on--which sounds great and all but the tax rate has to be uniform across the district and the entire district must vote in a single yes/no vote. So Bothell is spending its own money to go to Totem Lake but Seattle's more expensive needs can't be fully met because it would take the tax authority of the entire district to be spent in a single subarea and neither the voters or the Sound Transit district organization would go for that. This is what I alluded to when I wrote that I understand, politically, why ST3 is written as it is. Seattle as a city is never going to have the tax authority for us to buy the kind of in-city dense transit we really want. There's absolutely no reason for the state legislature to give it to us (especially not with that 1% hard property tax cap written into the state constitution) since leveraging Puget Sound's representatives for votes on allowing us to tax ourselves on a handful of transit packages is what the rest of the legislature uses to strongarm votes for road packages in the rest of the state (that, conveniently, never seem to have to go to the ballot). So I'm voting yes on ST3 because, with all due respect to Mars Saxman whom I really respect and really want his ideas to come true, I don't think we'll get a better package in four years.