Nickels wants new light rail vote next year

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels says Sound Transit should rebound from Tuesday's drubbing at the polls and come back with a new light rail plan for voters on the 2008 ballot.

"This is a critical problem, we need to do the work, but we shouldn't take two years or three years or four years to make this decision," Nickels told the agency's board of directors on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Puget Sound voters rejected both the roads and the transit plans in Proposition 1. Those were listed separately on the ballot, but voters had to approve both to pass the multibillion-dollar tax measure.

Even before all the votes were tallied, people began second-guessing linking the two proposals and speculating that it would be years before a new transportation plan appeared on the ballot. Indeed, new polling suggests pairing the roads and transit measure was a mistake.

Nickels said he was open to running a stand-alone transit plan but wasn't ruling anything out.

"I'm not making any assumptions about what that package looks like," he said. "I don't think the voters were saying, 'We don't want to invest in transportation, and it's not a problem.' But I think they were clearly telling us something, and we need to spend some time going out and listening."

Though voters rejected Proposition 1, an extensive poll commissioned by the Sierra Club showed that if the transit element of the measure had appeared on the ballot alone, it would have passed.

The Sierra Club joined forces with the anti-transit crowd and campaigned against Proposition 1, believing the measure included too much freeway expansion, relied on general taxes, including the sales tax, and did not address global warming.

According to the poll, 52 percent of voters say they would have voted for the transit portion had it been presented alone.

The poll also indicates that if the roads portion of the ballot measure had been presented independently, it might have passed as well.

Forty-five percent of those surveyed said they would vote yes and 16 percent were undecided on the package of road improvements in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

The poll surveyed 5,004 voters and had a margin of error of 1.4 percentage points.

Nickels said better voter turnout in 2008 could turn the tables for either or both plans. This year nearly 70 percent of the registered voters didn't cast a ballot.

"I recounted to (the Sound Transit Board) what happened in 1995 when the first Sound Transit plan was turned down, and I think that it offers us a pretty good lesson," Nickels said. "We went back to the ballot in 1996, in a presidential election, with the second Sound Transit plan and it was very different than the first one ... and we won going away."

Sound Transit officials haven't said yet when or if they'll put something back before voters.

John Taylor, spokesman for the Regional Transportation Investment District that created the roads plan, said he had not seen the poll and that it was too early to predict the next step.

Nickels said it doesn't make sense to relegate transportation measures to off-year elections. In the past, Democratic leaders in Olympia have resisted allowing transportation tax packages on the ballot in on-year elections.

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said the Legislature won't be inclined to rush out with a new tax measure.

"I don't think anybody today thinks the public is ready to go vote for a new tax," Kessler said. "I think everyone is getting together and talking about what, if anything, we should do and before we do anything we need to start talking about the 520 Bridge."

Kessler said that House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, typically proceeds with caution when it comes to tax measures.

The results of the Sierra Club poll contradict what transportation planners from the roads and transit camps thought -- that voters would not support just roads or just transit.

Pollster Thomas Riehle from RT Strategies said the exit poll revealed a concern that voters had that could have changed Proposition 1's outcome.

"We found that there was a group of voters who we would describe as pro-transit defectors," he said.

This new class was identified by cross-tabbing voters who said they would have voted yes to a transit-only plan with those who voted no on Proposition 1.

"The single largest reason they gave (for voting no) was environmental impacts like global warming," Riehle said.

Ric Ilgenfritz, Sound Transit's director of planning and public affairs, acknowledged that twinning the roads plan with the transit plan turned out to be detrimental.

"The strategy was to build a big-tent coalition to support a comprehensive approach and try to do roads and transit together," he said. "That was obviously a heavy lift. It drove us to a larger package and took us into that zone where people start to get nervous."

TRANSPORTATION POLL: THE NUMBERS

Voters in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties on Tuesday rejected Proposition 1, a multibillion-dollar tax package to fund road improvements and mass transit. A poll taken Nov. 4-6 found:

52% percent of voters said they would have voted for the transit portion of Prop 1 had it been presented by itself.

AMONG ALL 'NO' VOTERS

45% objected to higher taxes.

20% objected to Prop 1's impact on the environment.

Source: Poll of 5,004 voters commissioned by The

Sierra Club. Margin of error of 1.4 percentage points.

ON THE WEB

Want to learn more? Read the complete study online at canbesolved.com/download.