Redmond Officials Weigh In On Potential Bus Cuts

Metro bus riders could soon see service cuts around Redmond as the transit agency determines how to cope with an ongoing decline in tax revenue.

Victor Obeso, Metro’s service development manager, met with the Redmond City Council Tuesday evening to discuss King County’s newly proposed Strategic Plan for Public Transportation, which includes a set of guidelines to help the agency decide how to distribute service as budgets continue to decrease.

The plan incorporates recommendations from the Regional Transit Task Force, a 27-member group the county formed in 2010 to build a new policy framework for upcoming service reductions, which Obeso said could total 10 or 15 percent of the system’s total service.

Tuesday’s meeting also included a presentation by task force member Jim Stanton, who is manager of transportation, government affairs and development at Microsoft, and John Howell, founding partner of the Cedar River Group, which facilitated the task force.

Howell said projections for the ongoing decline in sales tax revenue, which makes up 62 percent of Metro’s budget, translate into a loss of up to 600,000 service hours from 2012 to 2015.

“That is equivalent to all weekend service that Metro provides, or all service in the east King (County) area,” he said. “It’s a significant body of service and potential cuts.”

The task force recommended three main considerations for future service decisions: route productivity, social equity and geographic value. Although productivity, which encompasses both usage and cost, is a priority, Obeso said providing some level of service to outlying areas is also a top consideration.

“We know that everyone contributes to the system and that everyone should have some benefit from that system, (but) the benefits may vary and levels of service may vary,” he said. “Just as we wouldn’t look at planning a food bank in Medina, we wouldn’t look at planning a 15-minute service operating 24 hours a day in Carnation.”

The new guidelines will replace a formula known as 40-40-20, which was put in place to guide growth in transit service. The rule dictated that 40 percent of all Metro service would go to the Eastside, 40 percent would go to south King County, and the remaining 20 percent would serve the city of Seattle and other western areas.

Officials who participated in Tuesday’s discussion acknowledged the 40-40-20 rule was never implemented as intended.

“I would argue that in most cases 40-40-20 has been a failure,” Stanton said. “It has not delivered service in the right spots where there’s demand, and it has not been a good cost-allocation way to let the agency run its business in the most efficient way possible.”

But specific information about how the new guidelines would affect service routes is still forthcoming.

Redmond City Councilmember Kimberly Allen serves on the county’s Regional Transit Committee, which will spend the next several weeks reviewing the strategic plan before making its own recommendations. Allen said she wants to receive more information about how the service changes will affect specific routes.

“It’s a little light on detail,” Allen said of the current plan. “There are going to be a lot of questions.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, some Redmond city council members expressed concern that a priority on route usage would jeopardize routes that take people around the Eastside during non-peak hours. Councilman Hank Margeson said he wants the future of the area’s transit system to focus on more than just getting people to and from work.

“What really makes a good bus service is being able to take it to a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day, so you’re not relying on a car if you’re in an urban center (like) Overlake or downtown Redmond,” Margeson said.

The Redmond City Council will also weigh in separately on the strategic plan, Allen said. The Regional Transit Committee is expected to act on the document by early summer, Obeso said, so that the King County Council can make a final decision before its August recess.