The members of the Coalition welcome the auditors from the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General, Les Smith, Sarah Batipps, and Al Larpenteur, to the beautiful and thriving central Puget Sound region where environmental quality is a treasure to be preserved, and where improvement of quality in the human-built environment is sought in our private and public spending. In support of these goals, we applaud the Inspector General's audit of Link Light Rail underway now.

Members of the Coalition pledge to cooperate enthusiastically with this audit.

We are an informal coalition of regional citizens who oppose the Link Light Rail plan of Sound Transit. The coalition includes elected officials past and present, business leaders, environmental activists, neighborhood leaders, and independent transportation planning professionals. We are supporters of mass transit systems that efficiently and effectively serve our region without engendering excessive risk and without damaging our communities.

Our regional commitment to mass transit is long standing. The five public bus systems operating in the region now serve approximately 200,000 round trip commuters every work day, using one of the most extensive networks of HOV lanes in the nation, and supplemented with one of the most comprehensive vanpool and carpool coordination programs anywhere in the world. In King County this past November voters reversed the effect of a statewide initiative cutting transit revenue by approving a new local 0.2 percent sales tax addition that preserves and expands Metro Bus service.

So, what problem do we have with Link Light Rail, which to some people must seem as a logical next step in transit development? After all, the Coalition members joined with the majority of this region's voters to support the 1996 ballot measure that authorized the Sound Transit agency to plan and build a $3.9 billion regional mass transit system of express buses, commuter rail on existing tracks, and light rail on new tracks.

I note in passing that the ST Express bus component is the most cost-effective part of the total Sound Transit system, and we support that part of Sound Transit's work to date.

The problem is, Link Light Rail costs too much, does too little, has been badly planned, violates laws and regulations, and for a variety of reasons is going to be fought locally at every turn in this region and eventually blocked and overturned.

An independent audit is long overdue.

We hope that the present Inspector General's audit is sufficiently broad in scope to expose the damage this project will cause to the integrity of the FTA New Starts oversight process, as well as broad enough to expose the damage that continuation of this project will bring to our shared goal of cost-effective mass transit in our region.

In the summer of 2000 several community-spirited individuals had grown increasingly skeptical of Sound Transit's light rail plan. We have worked to focus the attention of our communities' leaders on several disturbing aspects of Sound Transit's Link Light Rail project:

• Costs to build light rail were likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars higher than budgeted.

• Earlier in the year, citizens had filed a Federal suit against Sound Transit charging violation of the Civil Rights Act in the plan to run light rail tracks on the surface in the Rainier Valley while tunneling in other, wealthier neighborhoods to the north.

• Two other pending lawsuits filed in Federal court challenged the completeness and legality of the planning process that stands behind Link Light Rail.

• Growing awareness of planning documents that revealed light rail would cause no significant gain in public transit's market share of trips, and also not reduce freeway traffic congestion.

• Using the existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel for light rail would force buses up to the street, thus making congestion worse in downtown, and (surprisingly) reducing the passenger capacity of the Tunnel.

At the same time, citizens in Seattle without government funding or sanction but with professional planning expertise began to do their own planning for monorail and bus alternatives. A monorail planning program --approved by citizen initiative in 1997, but scuttled by Seattle City Government in Spring 2000-- once again fought its way back onto the ballot last November and once again received the approval of
Seattle voters.

Against this background of increasing and deep community concern, the Coalition issued a call for an independent audit of Link Light Rail on September 6, 2000, signed by over 80 Seattle area civic leaders participating in our coalition.

Before I turn to a review of subsequent events, let me introduce you to several of my elected colleagues from other local government jurisdictions around the region, who will state briefly their own perspective on the issues that need attention in an audit of Sound Transit:

[After elected leaders' comments.]

And also we have some leaders from the non-governmental sector of our region's economy whom I would like to introduce:

[After community leaders' comments.]

Before I turn to John Niles for a series of presentations that go deeper into issues of concern, let me tell you a little more of what happened after the Coalition call for an audit last September.

Sound Transit officials immediately rejected our audit call and, in effect, began to hunker down to wait out the 60-day Congressional review period in the apparent hope that its $500 million Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) pending with the Federal Transit Administration would not be derailed.

Then, just a few days after the implicit approval by Congress of the detailed FFGA agreement, Sound Transit embarked on a sequence of actions and revelations that can only be regarded as candidates for the most suspicious, flat-out outrageous and deeply disturbing series of events in the history of the United States government's financing of urban public transit projects.

Over the course of three board meetings between November, 2000 and January, 2001, the Sound Transit Board, the Seattle media, and the general public found out that the Link Light Rail project was in deep trouble. The Board took a series of remarkable actions:

• Suspended negotiations on the main tunnel construction contract -- a contract that had been expected to be signed prior to the execution of the FFGA;

• Put the Link project and the Congressionally-cleared FFGA on temporary hold;

• Appointed former Seattle Mayor Norman Rice to review the project;

• Accepted the resignation of Light Rail Director Paul Bay and appointed a replacement from the ranks of the agency's consultants;

• Learned from Sound Transit staff that the project needed another billion dollars and three more years of construction time;

• Canceled the outside review by the former Mayor;

• Solicited additional public comments on the project that were now much more negative than before;

• Reviewed the agency's revenue authority and found it sufficient to pay for the higher cost;

• Voted to continue the Light Rail project despite the cost increase and schedule slippage;

• Committed to a six to nine month program of additional design changes in 2001 before beginning construction;

• Renegotiated and achieved execution of the FFGA over the objections of the Chairman of the Transportation Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and a number of civil servants in the FTA; and

• Accepted the resignation of the Sound Transit Executive Director Bob White.

During this sequence, Link Light Rail cost overruns predicted by the Coalition since mid year 2000 have proved to be exceeded in actual fact, and the 1996 commitment to the voters to complete the project by 2006 has been extended by 30 percent.

Where do things stand as of this moment? Well, here is a preview of some of the major issues on which you will hear more today. We hope that Office of Inspector General will follow up on all of these issues:

The Coalition can show that Sound Transit has for many years presented incomplete and misleading information on the cost of Link Light Rail to both the public and the Federal Transit Administration. We foresee expenditures and debt levels ahead that are far beyond what voters approved in 1996.

We can describe how the 'sub-area equity' requirement initiated by Sound Transit and approved by the region's voters have now become an obvious roadblock to the successful implementation of the Link Light Rail plan set forth in the FFGA.

We have reason to believe that regional financial capacity is going to be severely stressed by the capital costs and debt service required to build Link Light Rail.

We have suspicions that the operating costs for Light Rail after revenue operations begin have been understated in light of experience reported in the National Transit Database.

We can now show that the new FFGA for Link Light Rail violates FTA regulations and should be rescinded by the FTA.

We can show that an array of critical local decisions necessary for the regulatory requirements of an accurate financial budget and construction schedule for Link Light Rail are not yet complete and will not be complete for at least six months.

The Coalition asserts that the alternatives analysis and environmental impact review that stand behind Link Light Rail are incomplete and inadequate and should be restarted. The failures within these planning processes are the subject of three Federal lawsuits initiated locally that are as yet undecided.

We can show that there is community opposition to Sound Transit's Link Light Rail at every point along the planned route, opposition based upon meritorious arguments that are likely to cause further delays in the construction schedule if not outright cancellation of the project.

We can show that there is now community support for alternative, citizen-initiated mass transit plans such as Seattle Monorail, Freeway Monorail, and Ride Free Express that have yet to be considered in the official alternatives analysis process of the local MPO and of Sound Transit, alternatives that energize citizen opposition to Link Light Rail and portend further citizen action to block Link Light Rail construction.

You will gain perspective on these issues as the day progresses.

Let me know introduce you to my Coalition colleague John Niles of Seattle, president of public policy research firm Global Telematics, and co-founder of the Public Interest Transportation Forum, a web-based resource for the presentation of issues related to public transportation.

[Later, following technical presentations.]

Before I take you out into the neighborhoods of Seattle to learn more about the planned light rail route and the reasons some citizens in the direct path of light rail construction are disturbed, I'll summarize the bottom line as follows:

The Coalition asserts that neither the interests of the Federal Government nor the citizens of this region are served by continuing the fiction put forward by the FFGA that Link Light Rail is "justified based on a comprehensive review of its mobility improvements, environmental benefits, cost effectiveness, and operating efficiencies."

The FFGA is now a blunt instrument coming from Washington, DC that is being used by the Sound Transit agency to justify locally the misconceived Link Light Rail Plan. We hope it is rescinded by the FTA. With that lead weight removed, the region will be in a position to rethink regional transit improvements and use the resources of Sound Transit much more cost-effectively.