Business leaders contend a 7th Avenue station comes with ill-considered utility relocation costs and convinced the agency to study their 5th Avenue alternative.
The Sound Transit Board of Directors has unanimously approved an $851,000 study to assess a new location for a planned South Lake Union station, moving it a few blocks west off the Aurora Avenue corridor to 5th Avenue N. A “Shifted North” station location under Westlake Avenue remains the agency’s preferred alternative for now, but the study could clear the way for a last-minute change to the plan affecting the timeline for the overall Ballard Link light rail project.
Earlier plans had called for Sound Transit to be finalizing its Ballard Link plan by now via a Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), but a series of planning hurdles has repeatedly held up the process. Instead, the agency is re-doing its Draft EIS (DEIS) in order to add a handful of late additions to the study. Despite the unanimous vote last week, some boardmembers signaled their patience could be wearing thin.
“I support it today, but there may be a day downstream where I’m asking my good colleagues in the Seattle-King County area to find a way to stay within budget,” Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier said Friday.
In contrast, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, who brought the motion, argued the South Lake Union economic engine was vital to the entire region, necessitating further study to minimize construction impacts. Harrell has welcomed further study as he has backed a rotating cast of station alternatives at different points this year, from the Shifted West alterative in May, to the original Westlake option in mid-July, to the Shifted North in late July, to seeming to return to the Shifted West Denny option once more in December as the pairing with a Shifted West station for South Lake Union has come into the mix.
“This [option] further seems to reduce the biggest construction impacts on Westlake and Harrison, which again we’ve explained on other occasions how important that is for all of our regions for our entire state for that matter,” Harrell said ahead of the vote. “And quite candidly, it seems to suggest that this is superior to the consolidation alternative currently included in the DEIS, so we think we still have many questions. This still is worthy of study and it shows a lot of promise.”
The motion sets a goal of quickly conducting the feasibility study and presenting results to the public in April 2024, with board consideration envisioned in May. Beyond addressing constructability, Sound Transit will evaluate “implications for ridership, transit integration, environmental concerns, costs, and other considerations,” an agency update stated.
For the new alternative to stay in contention, the board would need to formally add the 5th and Harrison option to the Draft EIS, which is already being redone due to the late addition of new station proposals for Uptown, Denny, Pioneer Square, and Chinatown-International District (CID) not in the original Draft EIS published in 2022. That DEIS redo had been slated to wrap up in late-2024 barring additional delays.
If the board opts to add the new 5th Avenue alternative to the Draft EIS that would entail planning delays that the agency estimates at ten months if the option is ultimately passed over, or up to two years if it becomes the preferred alternative, which would necessitate further engineering work the other vetted options have a head start on. Since time is money when it comes to construction and inflation, that delay could be very costly, as Eric Goldwyn, a transportation planning expert who serves on Sound Transit’s Technical Advisory Group, noted.
“The decision to study a new station alternative will cost ~$800,000 in consultant fees,” Goldwyn said in a tweet. “It will likely delay the project by a year, which, just in inflation terms could cost [about] $750,000,000, assuming 5%. Pencils down!”
