By Evan Waara, The Seattle Medium
In 2022 Sound Transit began the process of developing a new rail line connecting Ballard and West Seattle through the Link Light Rail system, but the plan did not meet the needs of the communities that would house the new stations.
Now, more than a year later, there is still no clear path forward as Sound Transit weighs the options of two new stations: one that includes one station north and one station south of the Chinatown International District (CID), and another option that includes one station built on Fourth Avenue between Union Station and King Street Station.
Community organizations in CID have been working hard to have their voices heard and advise the governing bodies on what each station’s impacts would be.
Sound Transit’s environmental impact statements (EIS) are designed to show how new construction would impact both the natural environment and the communities occupying those spaces. The goal of their analysis is to find locations that maximize community benefits while minimizing potential negative impacts.
Achieving these goals is much harder than it may seem. Thousands of residents of the CID have been speaking up to Sound Transit and other city offices throughout the period of public comment. The initial plan for another station in CID would have resulted in several businesses being permanently displaced from a neighborhood that has just been ranked the 11th most endangered historic place by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“The community showed up at public meetings and made public comments. The community wrote comment letters about the draft EIS.” said Kathleen Barry Johnson, the executive director of Historic South Downtown. “Probably thousands of pages of comment letters.”
As this process moved forward, the transit committee, composed of city and county officials, selected the north and south of CID stations as the preferred choice. The north station would be near Pioneer Square and the south near the existing Stadium Station. The Fourth Avenue shallow option meaning it will reuse existing tracks and require less surface digging will also be reviewed further.
Community organizations were at the forefront of the efforts to create a plan that suits the residents of CID and doesn’t create economic hardship or significant impacts on daily life.
“One of the commercial tenants in the city found out that his store was going to be impacted by one of the station options and no one had spoken to him about it.” said Chrissy Shimizu, the executive director of the Puget Sound Sage, an organization that advocates for policies that give communities more influence. “They had only reached out to the building owners and many of the neighborhood’s nonprofit executive directors.”
The surprise to many business owners encouraged community members to take action, and to let officials know that a history of being left out of the process would not be repeated.
“We held a listening session for our community at the close of public comment to get additional feedback,” Shimuzu said. “And we also hosted a public education workshop at the Wing Luke Museum where we went through the draft EIS as a community and tried to understand what that information meant.”
However, the Fourth Avenue option appeared to not be as well developed as the plan for the options north and south of CID, according to Johnson.
“It seems that wherever there was a choice to be made–and one choice made the construction impacts better, and one choice made them worse–the choice was made that ended up with worse construction impacts,” Johnson said. “They put the tunnel boring machine on Fourth and Jackson, which is going to cause incredible disruption when you could put it at the north end of the tunnel far away from our neighborhood in an area where it wouldn’t cause as much disruption.”
Nevertheless, Johnson said they will make the north-south option work because, “That’s what we do. But it represents a refusal to invest in Chinatown International District, because it’s difficult.”
These organizations and the communities affected by the construction of this rail line and future rail lines are letting city officials know they do not want the city to take the easy way out. Creating projects that are equitable is hard, but it is necessary to preserve Seattle’s historic neighborhoods.
“It’s a very complicated process. It takes forever. So I can see how it would be very frustrating for people.” said Rachelle Cunningham, the public information officer of Sound Transit.. “There’s no firm deadline. But I think there’s a sense of urgency at this point, you know, to make these decisions and move forward as quickly as possible”
The current estimate for the completion of the West Seattle and Ballard Link extension is 2039.
