By Gregory Roberts
PostGlobe
State Senator Fred Jarrett at a recent King County Executive candidates debate (Johnathan Fitzpatrick)
Former P-I political reporter Gregory Roberts joins our team. and he notes that King County Executive candidates Ross Hunter and Fred Jarrett supported legislation in Olympia to allow King County to impose taxes for ferries. But now they are attacking the ferry idea.
It wasn’t only the members of the King County Council – some of them now urgently changing course on the issue – that made it possible for the county to impose a property tax to finance costly foot ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
The Legislature had something to do with it, too – including two of its members now campaigning for county executive and taking shots at their election opponents for supporting the ferry tax on the council.
In 2003, the Legislature agreed to give the King County Council the authority to impose a property tax of up to 75 cents per $1,000 to raise money for passenger-only ferry routes. The proposal unanimously passed the House, with support from Ross Hunter and Fred Jarrett, who are now running for county executive.
But Hunter and Jarrett say it’s one thing for the Legislature to authorize the county to enact a tax and another for the county to abuse that authority by imposing it without a careful financial analysis of the situation.
State Rep. Ross Hunter also supported a ferry bill in Olympia (Photo: Johnathan Fitzpatrick)
It’s a messy business, the whole ferry affair, the kind of thing that makes politics either entertaining or revolting, depending on your point of view.
After the ultimate success of initiative guru Tim Eyman’s 1999 drive to cut car tabs to $30 crimped the revenue available for ferries, the state decided to get out of the foot-ferry business: Ferries are expensive to operate, and it’s difficult to recover much of their costs from fares that walk-on passengers are willing to pay.
In April 2007, as the deadline approached for the state to end its financing of the downtown Seattle-to-Vashon Island foot ferry, the County Council voted unanimously to create a ferry agency – the King County Ferry District – as outlined in the 2003 legislation, with the council doubling as the agency’s board of directors. The prime sponsor of the measure was Dow Constantine, whose council district includes Vashon Island.
The council put out a long news release ( metrokc.gov/council/news/2007/0407/ferry_district.htm) congratulating itself on the move, with quotations from five of its nine members – among them Julia Patterson, who said: “Waterborne options are as much a part of the transportation system as any bus or road, and we need to start looking at ways to expand those options throughout the region.”
In November 2007, after several meetings of the Ferry District board and a public hearing, council members voted 8-1 for a property tax of 5.5 cents per $1,000 to raise nearly $20 million a year to finance the district’s operational plan. That plan included taking over the Vashon Island foot ferry from the state and converting the Elliott Bay water taxi that runs downtown to West Seattle into a year-round route financed by the district, instead of a seasonal route covered by the county’s Metro bus and transit budget.
The plan also included a something-for-almost-everyone list of “demonstration” projects – sort of ferry try-outs – with five routes touching each of five different council districts, represented, respectively, by Patterson, Bob Ferguson, Larry Gossett, Jane Hague and Larry Phillips. The only vote against the plan came from Reagan Dunn, whose Eastside district did not get a route (nor did the districts of Kathy Lambert, in northeast King County, and Pete von Reichbauer, in South King County, but they voted for the plan).
“We’re all tired of struggling through traffic on our region’s most congested roads,” Patterson, whose district would get two routes, said in the news release ( kingcounty.gov/council/news/2007/November/ferryvote.aspx ) issued after the November vote. “Ferry service provides one more transportation option that is reliable, on time and faster than getting in your car.”
And Phillips said, “Waterborne transit is a key component to keeping our transportation system afloat.”
Since then, the economy collapsed, sharply reducing government tax collections. Barack Obama was elected president and gave County Executive Ron Sims a position in his administration – and Jarrett, Hunter, Constantine and Phillips (among others) entered the race to win election to Sims’ old job this year.
On July 9, as part of his campaign proposal to reform the county budget, Jarrett, now a state senator from Mercer Island, said the county should hold off on expansion of the ferry system. But the issue really blew up on July 15 when Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat called the foot-ferry plan a “folly” ( seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2009472120_danny15.html ), citing studies that found the taxpayer subsidy for the proposed demonstration routes could run as high as $325 per fare-paying rider per trip.
Suddenly, the political order of the day seemed to be full speed astern. Left in the wake is Constantine, cast as a sort of cross between Captains Ahab and Bligh.
Patterson called her vote for the ferry district plan “the worst vote of my entire political career,” according to The Seattle Times ( seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009584125_ferryvote02m.html ). Only when she saw that its proponents had the votes to pass it, she said, did she wangle two demonstration routes to Seattle for her district, from Des Moines and from Renton – the two routes considered the least viable of the five in terms of ridership, according to a subsequent county study.
Lambert said she was muscled into voting for the ferry tax by Constantine, who threatened to kill a separate proposed tax for river flood control – an issue especially important in Lambert’s district – if she didn’t go along with him.
Phillips echoed Lambert regarding the pressure from Constantine in linking the two measures, although Phillips acknowledged he supported the ferry tax on its own. He has called for its complete repeal, with the idea of replacing it with a tax of equal size dedicated to Metro.
Patterson said the ferry and flood measures were linked, but she didn’t finger Constantine.
Jarrett has jumped on both Constantine and Phillips. He would leave the water taxi and Vashon Island ferries in place – something that could be accomplished by retaining 1 cent of the existing ferry tax, according to a proposal put forth by current County Executive Kurt Triplett, who is not a candidate in the election.
Hunter, a Bellevue representative, would try to preserve the route to Vashon Island – which is not connected by bridges to the mainland – but he’s skeptical about the water taxi, despite its popularity: “It looks really expensive to me,” he said.
Hunter has mailed out fliers to voters with a picture of a speeding powerboat on one side, claiming the county could afford to buy each of its foot-ferry passengers a new Bayliner 175 with the money it collects per year through the ferry tax.
As for Constantine, he now supports Triplett’s proposal to eliminate financing for the demonstration routes – which, a spokesman said, were never Constantine’s primary concern. And Constantine denies ever having a conversation with Lambert in which he threatened to block the flood-control tax.
Constantine, the spokesman said, regards foot ferries as “buses on the water.” Given that buses can’t reach Vashon, a passenger-only ferry to there makes sense, while the water taxi actually covers a higher percentage of its operating costs from fares than most Metro buses, the spokesman said.
Metro recovers 20 percent to 25 percent of its bus operating costs through fares, an agency spokeswoman said.
For the private contractor who runs the water taxi, that farebox recovery rate is about 65 percent, ferry district Executive Director Kjristine Lund said, although the figure drops to 35 percent when free connecting shuttle buses in West Seattle are factored in. Should Metro take over the management of the route as now contemplated for 2010, those numbers would drop into the midteens because of higher administrative overhead, she said.
The Vashon Island foot ferry, now operated under contract by the state, gets back about 23 percent of its costs from fares (excluding free bus shuttles), while county management is projected to reduce that to 16 percent, Lund said.
The ferry district doesn’t necessarily accept the ridership and cost projections of the previous studies, Lund said.
The district’s own evaluation of the proposed Shilshole-to-downtown demonstration route, which is considered one of the most viable, estimates the farebox recovery rate at 42 percent without free shuttle buses and 23 percent with shuttles, provided management is handled by a private contractor, Lund said. Hiring private operators for its ferries is an option the district is more strongly considering, given the bureaucratic inefficiencies of county administration, she said.
