Last Thursday, the Senate Transportation Committee voted on Senate Bill 5001, which would replace the current appointed Sound Transit Board with directly elected members. The bill was amended to reduce the number of directly elected Board members from 19 to 11, and “directs the districting commission to not allow more than five electoral districts solely in one county.” The second amendment to the bill exists to ensure that King County would not dominate the Board.

The bill was supported out of committee by nine legislators, including Democrat Senators Steve Hobbs and Kevin Van de Wege. It has been referred to Senate Rules, from which it needs to be pulled in order to move to the Senate Floor for debate.

The committee’s ranking minority member, Senator Hobbs, shared concerns about the bill during a public hearing in January, yet supported the legislation out of committee.

In his comments on Thursday, he said he believed it would be good for the Sound Transit Board to be more accountable to voters the way he and other legislators are. When speaking about the bill, he said:

“To be a good elected official you have to be willing to admit when you’re wrong at times or if you receive new information to change your mind. At first I was completely and utterly opposed to this bill but now I’ve received new information and so now I feel like this bill should be more of a work in progress…I believe that perhaps Sound Transit, by using a different valuation system, and their indication that we perhaps had told them to do this or gave them a legislative intent to go to a different system…might have been a miscommunication. Maybe perhaps different governance would have changed that. I don’t know. But I would like to just see this bill move forward as a work in progress and see if we can sort all this out.”

We will continue to track the progress of this legislation. As legislators and taxpayers are recognizing, public accountability is necessary and in our view, overdue, for an agency that continues to mislead voters.