Hello, everybody, and welcome
to Transportation Choices Coalition's.
Our transit talk today
on the Enterprise Iinitiative, delivering on Sound transit vision.
Thank you all for being here on the,
I believe, most anxious day in Seattle history.
Today we are thrilled to be
hosting our first in-person transit talk in over three years.
And our first one back here at the Bertha Knight Landis Room in over six years.
So thank you all for being here so much this morning,
and we're so excited to dive into this topic.
And we are thrilled to be able to, to be joined
by two incredible panelists to dive into this, pressing topic.
And we really think beyond whether the Mariners are going to win tonight.
We think the question on the, on everyone's lips
is, how do we get light rail built in this region?
People are excited for this, and that's what we're going to dive into today.
So if you don't know who I am, I'm Kirk Hovankotter
and the Executive Director of Transportation Choices Coalition.
We are Washington State's nonprofit advocate for safe, sustainable
and equitable transportation.
For over 34 years, we've been a coalition of business, labor,
transit agencies, transit riders and elected leaders, all beating the drum
for more investment in transit and safe walks of transit and sound transit.
Light rail is key to, our mission as an organization.
We were proud to be the organization
that led the campaigns in, 2016, 2008.
In 1996, that got Sound Transit expanded across the region.
So making sure this project gets done is critical to our mission.
And we know that people want this.
In 2016, over 54% of the three county
region voted to expand light rail across the region.
No other topic or issue has brought together the three counties
in this way, and right now, Sound Transit is navigating a critical phase
following the announced cost overruns.
In August, the agency is reassessing how to deliver that transit system
that riders want.
And today, we're going to explore Sound Transit's current effort
to deliver this light rail affordably.
And before I begin, I want to quickly do a land
acknowledgment, acknowledge that we are on the lands of the Coast Salish people.
The Coast Salish nations are people who steward this land today.
And we're grateful to be able to host this in the Bertha Knight Landes
Room on Coast Salish lands
quickly for housekeeping here at the Bertha Knight Landes
room. We have bathrooms just down the hallway.
There's water fountains.
Feel free to get up and enjoy our coffee and snacks.
And most importantly, we are going to be taking questions from the audience.
As you walked in today, you should have been, given a note card.
Please feel free to write down, your question on that new card.
And, when we go to audience Q&A, feel free to pass that to Transportation
Choices Coalition staff,
who will collect that and get that up to us to be able to ask those questions.
All right.
And this event would not be possible without our great partners.
So I'm thrilled to be able to welcome Allison Dane Camden,
the vice president of STV and Northwest regional manager,
who's going to join us to say a few words and introduce our illustrious panel.
Alison.
- I'll take the applause.
Thank you. Good morning everyone.
Thank you for being here today for this in-person edition of TCC Transit Talk.
As Kirk mentioned, I'm Allison Dane, Camden Vice
President and Pacific Northwest area manager for STV.
So good to see so many familiar faces in the crowd.
STV has been around for over 100 years.
We've been in the Pacific Northwest, serving clients here as a,
architecture, engineering and construction management firm for the past 15.
And, I'm really, really pleased to be able to introduce these two leaders today
who are helping to do so much to move our region's mobility forward.
First, a few words about Sound Transit.
As you all know, we are in the middle of one of the most
the most ambitious, expansion of transit our region has ever seen.
Projects like the Eastlink extension and the upcoming opening of Federal
Way Link Extension are just, they're more than tracks and stations.
They are powerful investments in mobility,
equity, access and economic opportunity.
When people have choices for how they can get to work,
to recreation, to school, our regional economy becomes stronger,
our communities are more connected, and our quality of life improves.
I'm especially proud of the work that STV is doing in
partnership with Sound Transit on the Eastlink extension,
helping to deliver one of the region's most complex light rail projects.
Our teams work in systems construction management.
Services is a small but vital part of the project.
And transforming this region, it's so incredibly, and,
exciting to see it come to life so soon.
And of course, I personally can't
wait for the opening of the federal highway extension.
It's going to make my selfishly make my commute much better.
I was just joking with my 13 year old, almost 13 year old son this morning.
He turns 13 on December 6th, the day that the new light rail station opens.
And I told him that was his birthday present.
He gets, you know, a better light rail connection.
He did not think that made a good,
celebratory present, but I disagree, and it's great to be here today
to to celebrate some of those upcoming successes.
Turning to our two guests, they really do need no introduction,
but allow me to share. Just a quick summary.
Dow Constantine comes to Sound Transit as CEO
after a long career of public service in the Puget Sound region,
including nearly two decades on the Sound Transit Board and four terms
as King County Executive, he brings deep regional experience
and a passionate belief in transit's role as the, backbone of our economy.
Terri Mestas is deputy CEO and chief capital delivery officer at Sound Transit.
With more than 30 years
leading major infrastructure programs from aviation to national security,
and now overseeing the agency's expansion portfolio of tens of billions
of dollars of investments.
And she's the kind of leader who delivers projects, manages complexity, builds
partnerships and levels the playing field for small and diverse businesses.
Together, Dow and Terry represent the strategic vision
and the delivery muscle that the region needs.
To see this expansion through.
Please join me in welcoming them to the stage and go Mariners!
- Thanks for already being on stage. So,
Before we dive
into what it's going to take to deliver Sound Transit three,
I want to take a moment and reflect on the chapter or region is closing
on December 6th, as Alison mentioned, will open
Federal Way Link and next year will open the Cross Lake connection.
That will be the completion of Sound
Transit to the ballot measure that we helped pass in 2008.
And that is a big chapter that's closing in our region.
Dow. Can you share what does it mean for a region to complete this?
- Well, it should be, really reassuring to us,
and I think it should give us confidence about the future.
I mean, sound transit to a difficult birth.
Some of us have been around for a long time.
Remember the roads and transit measure where we tried to pair
our transit improvements with the roads package? And,
everyone who disliked one or the other voted no, and that went down in flames.
But we got Sound Transit two on the ballot, not with a unanimous vote
out of the board initially, but and we got it passed.
And over that period of time,
history has handed
us, a lot of, interesting twists and turns.
There have been recessions and national and global tumult,
and we've had to stop and reset periodically to be able to have our,
ambitions, aligned with our finances.
But ultimately, we persevere through generations of board members,
through generations of, elected leaders throughout the region, through
generations of voters who continued to support Sound Transit.
And over 16 years, we've built,
48 miles of rail.
You know, it seems like it's taken forever.
But when I talk about this with my national peers, there, astonished
at the speed at which we have rolled out this still new system.
And so, I think that that, you know, Sound Transit, two,
as we look back over all of the challenges is a real success story, and it is one
that should give us confidence that we can take on whatever challenges
the world throws us as we move forward to build Sound Transit three.
- Terri anything to add,
- I think, we'll turn this on.
I, I, you know, I think Dow probably covered it all. So,
so I'm going to talk alot.
No, no. Okay, great.
- Well, moving on to Sound Transit three.
We've heard a lot of news from,
reporters in the region, as well as from the dais
at the Sound Transit Board about the enterprise initiative.
Dao, can you give us the enterprise initiative 101?
What is it and why should people care? - So,
you know, we're facing a lot of a lot of challenges, again.
And one of our, obligation is to sort of continually
show that our long range financial plan is in balance.
And it became clear that it was not in balance.
And historically, what we've done in these moments is simply turn to capital
and start either canceling or delaying projects,
extensions, garages, what have you.
What we wanted to do is take a more holistic view
and a more, I think, thought, take a more thoughtful approach,
to balancing our long range financial plan by including,
thoughtful approaches to all of our capital projects,
which I think Terry will be able to talk about, but also looking
at the long term cost curve of operations and maintenance,
because we were mostly a construction agency at first.
And, one day we woke up and realized we were one of the nation's major
operating agencies.
And those operating costs are going to continue to go up over time.
So bending that curve is critical to balancing that financial plan.
And then there's finance itself.
We are fortunate to have a robust
ongoing revenue stream approved by the voters,
which makes us quite unusual for transit agency nationally.
Many of them, most of them go to their legislature , hand
hat in hand, on an ongoing basis, asking for money to keep going.
So the voters have given us a much more solid foundation,
and it's our job
to figure out how to leverage that revenue stream to greatest advantage.
Do we have the capital
we need in the moments we needed to build those projects?
Did you want to talk a little bit about capital?
- Sure, yeah.
I'll just, maybe take us back to last year, October,
when, the information on West Seattle came out
and there was a motion that was brought forward by the system
expansion committee on a cost workplan, focused on all the capital
projects and the costs.
And that evolved,
as, CEO Constantine said, to a more holistic approach.
So the enterprise plan as it exists today is is kind of a four legged stool.
There is the capital part
looking at how we can be more efficient in how we deliver the work.
There is, operational or service delivery part
and how we can operate in a more efficient way.
There is the financial piece on how we're going to be able to sustain
and be able to, support all of these activities.
And then there's the policy part, which is where the board is
going to come in and obviously set policy and provide some direction,
with with feedback, of course, from community.
So, so that's, that's how the enterprise is set up.
And then of course, we have these levers that under each of those, stool legs,
we have levers that we can pull, to create
different scenarios that the board is going to be able to evaluate on.
So we'll show kind of the scenarios in terms of the funding
and kind of the financial, output of that scenario as we go along.
So really, I think it's, it's a very rigorous
and a very organized way to look at our cost challenges,
but also to look at all the optionality we have.
And it also has disciplined us to look at how
other benefits can be created through this work,
and revisit some of and also revisit what our peer agencies are doing.
Is there things that we should be considering in our in our program
that will enhance it?
And so starting to look at those things now.
- If I could just to kind of wrap this up with a bow and part of the
the advantage of looking at all of these together is
that we're able to see how they relate to one another.
And just one example of choices that you make in capital
when you're building the system can, have real implications
for your operating costs, moving out into the future.
And so we have to decide, is the savings we're achieving capital
worth the long term, increase in operating costs, or vice versa?
Should we invest more in something now, in capital?
Because we know that it's going to reduce maintenance or improve operations
in the future?
- Thanks for that.
One follow up.
Is there any metaphor that's relevant in people's day to day lives that you can
would compare this to
- For the enterprise plan? Yeah.
Oh gosh.
- I mean, we've we've had a lot of puns
about the enterprise, I can tell you that for sure.
But I you know, what metaphor are you thinking of?
- I'm just thinking about when people are investing
in their home and trying to, or maintain their home.
Is there a metaphor that you can tie that?
- You know, an example might be when you're installing systems
in your home, it might be cheaper to,
keep your old furnace, for example.
But if you converted to a new heat pump, it's an upfront investment.
But over time, you're going to save money and you're going to be cool
in the summer as well. So it's better service and less money.
- Well, speaking of costs, I think everyone who goes to the grocery
store knows that rising costs are an issue.
From eggs, to rising home prices
here in this region, everyone is facing higher costs.
And we also know that building
highways, streets and trains are also facing those same pressures.
Can you two share your perspectives on what the biggest cost drivers are?
A factory affecting the delivery of Sound Transit three?
And, Terry, can I start with you?
- Sure.
Well, I'm can state the obvious, material costs.
Right. We're still in a little bit of a volatile market.
You know, material costs have not returned, to pre-COVID costs.
And so I'm still seeing,
some impacts there, the cost of labor,
that continues to rise.
But also time, you know, I, we talk about time a lot
when we talk about projects because things cost.
There's only a metaphor in there.
But things cost more, as you know, the, the,
the value of a dollar is not the same over time, it loses its value.
You can buy less for it.
So we're seeing some of that occur.
The other thing I'll say is when you start a big program like this
and you have a conceptual idea on how you're going to traverse, a large region.
In this particular case, you don't necessarily understand
all of the complexities as far as what it's going to take.
The type of construction,
maybe some of the site conditions that you're going to face.
And so as the design begins to evolve,
as we begin to know more, you know, we have that scope evolution.
Sometimes, though, that information also impacts costs.
You're going to see a rise there.
I also will say that the any complex project,
there's a lot of complexities in just how you construct it.
Right. And so especially in an urban setting.
So there are those costs.
And of course, you know, permitting, regulatory those that process it is
it is long and, and obviously
something that we go through, but the kind of that, that time
and that complexity sometimes, adds cost to the projects as well.
- Clearly.
And you alluded to this in the the experience of a global pandemic
changed things radically, and prices went up across the board,
but construction prices went up a lot.
And transportation construction, for some reason, was the worst of all.
And it's not just, transit or rail, it's transportation across the board.
And you can say, oh, well, Covid was a while ago, right?
So we're back to normal.
But those cost increases are kind of baked in.
And then the interest just compounds over time.
Right.
So those are increased costs that continue to produce
inflation in the work that we have to do.
There is the uncertainty of the federal government and trade policy.
There is, the very real pressure of,
still a tight labor market for folks in the trades here in our region.
There is the real estate market.
Our acquisition of real property is,
very challenging when it's quite scarce as it is here.
And thus expensive.
And yes,
permitting from the various jurisdictions through which our,
facilities pass.
Is a critical issue.
And I just want to stop, since we're here in Seattle City Hall
and thank, the city of Seattle and Mayor Harrell's administration
for taking this seriously, for creating real permitting reforms,
and for putting in place a team that can match our team
and be able to move things along more quickly.
Because, as Terri said, in this business in particular, time is money, and sooner
we can get permits, the less projects will cost.
- Well, that's a great transition to the next question.
It's been nearly nine years since voters approved Sound Transit three back in 2016,
and Dow, as you mentioned, the world has changed a lot then we've had a pandemic.
There's been two Trump administrations.
Our region has grown by over half a million people.
How do we adapt to this moment and maintain public trust
in what voters voted for, while also delivering on that promise?
- Well, I would go back to my,
first answer about Sound Transit two, I think, and I'm
not the kind of person who spends a lot of time looking back and,
accomplishments and and and living in the past.
I'm always charging forward.
But it is useful here to celebrate the opening of Federal Way, to celebrate
the opening of East Link, to recognize how much we have accomplished.
That was not easy, you know, through difficult times.
And to recognize that we have the metal, we have the, the substance
to be able to continue to do that,
we can thrive and adjust and adapt.
And sometimes the choices that we're faced with will be difficult choices.
But I think that you're going
to find you're going to see that,
a lot of the innovations that particularly our capital team is coming up with,
are not
simply, you know, reductions in what we're getting.
They're not reductions in scope or delay.
They are thinking,
with the benefit of time more clearly about what we are trying,
the ultimate goal we're trying to achieve and finding better ways to get there
within the resources we have available.
- Terri, anything that there,
you know, I'll I'll add that, in ST2,
we did have a lot of one of a kind projects or scope elements.
And the fact that we've been able to, implement those projects
successfully, you know, again, a little bit a lot of complexity,
I think shows, the depths of the team and also the depth of the partners
that we're working with to be able to build hard things,
but things that have never actually been contemplated anywhere in the world.
So I hope that that gives the community some, some comfort
and confidence in our ability to execute on ST3.
- Yeah, very excited to read the first light rail train over a floating bridge.
Counting down the days.
But I think that's a great transition.
So, Terri,
you're now a veteran of the agency after being here for a year and a half.
What have you learned from those recent projects in Sound Transit 2,
and how do they inform your approach to Sound Transit three?
- Yeah.
So, anybody who's worked for me or with me knows that I love data.
And I look at a lot of information.
And so we did, not only a lot of trend analysis on ST2,
to see what happened and did some lessons learned, but also talk to peer agencies
to understand what's happening across the transportation market.
I think the lessons learned.
And when we get asked this question a lot,
the the first thing that comes to mind is, is partnerships.
We need to have strong partnerships with,
our community, with our partners, such as the city of Seattle,
with, with also our contracting community,
our professional service partners, labor,
because these are multi-year, very hard projects and,
without those partnerships of kind of that project first mentality,
we're all here together to make the project successful.
It is a hard road, and there's going to be a lot of disagreement along the way.
And typically that amounts to time lost.
Right.
So I think the partnerships is absolutely key.
We talk about that a lot,
and we're actually bringing forward some new collaborative delivery methods,
that allow for increased partnership with our contractor
early on, along with our other other partners.
I will also say that,
we need to get more information on projects earlier.
There's been a really big push to go out where we can
is to do more geotech investigation, learn more about our sites
so we can understand earlier what we're dealing with,
and start to look at those costs, but also start to look at
how we can mitigate some of the risks and not having them come at the 11th hour.
And it might be too late to really respond or mitigate.
And it's something that we have to accept.
So, knowing more, doing more earlier as much as we possibly can.
I'll also say in the spirit of partnership,
our ability to make decisions,
hence why it's so important to get that information early,
make decisions, and then we really need to adhere to decisions as we go along.
And and, and kind of forge
our way forward, as much as we possibly can.
And then I'll say the other thing too
is, is on bundling and how we work with our contractor community
to do this work, when we're talking about projects
that are around $1 billion or more than $1 billion, there's
really a limited pool of contractors who can do this type of work.
And also also in the heavy civil space.
And so making sure that, we are aware of how we need to engage with them,
whether it's through the delivery method,
how we bundle the work, the sequencing of the work.
Getting that expertise on early, is is absolutely key.
And then we're applying all of those things here as we look at ST three.
- Thanks for that.
Dow anything to add?
- That's a Terri question.
- Going to something that's near and dear to riders.
I mean, it's no secret that riders have faced unreliable service
over the last few years on the lines we currently have,
whether it's ventilation issues, whether it's pantograph,
breaking, whether it's copper
wire theft, the system is more fragile than we would want.
And we know that we're trying to deliver the system affordably,
but we want to build it right.
So we don't continue to run in these issues.
So Terri, this for you first, can you share how you're balancing
the trade offs between cost savings today to be able to deliver the projects
in a reliable system so people aren't complaining in the future?
- Yeah, yeah.
And I guess I'll just start off with saying that,
cost savings don't necessarily mean you're, you're you're getting less.
I know there's that connotation when you look at kind of cutting cutting cost
and you automatically think about cutting scope.
And that's not the approach.
So I know we've all heard the term value engineering,
but value engineering is not just skill cutting.
It is looking at how you're going to deliver the same level of service
or at the same level of performance, just in a different way.
And so that that's obviously the first lens that we look at.
It can be through materiality.
It can be through the, construction approach, sequencing of events.
It could be a type of bridge.
There's a lot of ways to do that.
And so, and I also think to that
through this exercise that we've been going through
with the enterprise work plan, we're actually finding more benefits
with the cost savings or these are really what I like
to call efficiencies, but we're also finding other benefits.
The stations is a really great example of that.
Stations do represent a significant cost on our program.
When as you can imagine, it's like building a house using a metaphor.
The bigger house that you build, you know, the more expensive it's going to be.
Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better.
And so looking at, how we can build the stations to provide
a premium experience, but also a consistent experience,
there's passive and there's active wayfinding
when you're going through a station, which is, similar in, in layout
that is passive wayfinding, you're going to get familiar with it.
You can go around the stations for easy to navigate,
and it becomes a more pleasant experience, one without any guessing.
As you go through a station and you're able to potentially save on,
the cost of the amount of space, how large your station is.
Maybe you're looking at the, vertical conveyance systems, putting those in really,
in areas where they're,
it's obviously convenient, it's intuitive.
And so that's a really good example.
And and also say, looking at the system more of a kit of parts
and having that consistency in that repetition as we go forward
and build this as opposed to kind of everything is, is unique.
Right.
And, and kind of bespoke,
the other thing that we're looking at,
is, state of good repair and our resiliency work.
One of the things that we did, last year and also a little bit into this years,
we looked at how we needed to organize the agency to be also efficient
in the way that we deliver the work, that there's cost savings there as well.
And one of the things that resulted from that was the state of good repair,
which is actually a very significant portfolio, again, includes
the resiliency work has moved over to capital delivery to implement.
And that is so that we can we can apply all the strategies
that we're using on the big projects
also to how we deliver the state of good repair and be more efficient.
And that could be through some bundling economies of scale that could be, when,
you know, when there's a timing, opportunity
on when we can implement certain work, taking advantage of that.
So I'll say that, that we're not going
to give up anything on the safety and the resiliency of the system.
We're going to figure out how we can do it all more efficiently.
And, and I think also provide a better experience for our riders.
- So, I brought in,
a new deputy CEO for service delivery ,
real interesting guy, fifth generation railroader.
He's worked, Burlington Northern as well as many, many public agencies
and really set him to work, on going through the,
resiliency measures that normal people would call it reliability.
But in transit, we call it resiliency.
For some reason, the resiliency measures laid out in a pretty extensive report
that my predecessor, commissioned, from the company
and, and,
really identifying how we can go through and make some of these repairs
or corrections to the system
to reduce some of the more common causes of unplanned disruptions.
And they have, in fact, been decreasing, notwithstanding the fact
that we had one at the end of the two line, over the weekend.
We are getting better.
We're having fewer of those challenges with signals, fewer of the challenges.
Traction power.
It is absolutely critical that we deliver reliable service,
because that is one thing that's going to keep people from
making the permanent shift to transit.
If they can't rely on it to get them where they need to be.
Leaving aside the fact that the roads are reliably unreliable,
as we all know,
my commitment is that we are going to make the system
that we have built as reliable as it can be, so that when you get
on, you know, you're going to be able to get to work or get to the airport
and get to your appointment.
In the time stated, every single time, that is the promise of
transit, rail transit in particular, which runs in its own right of way.
And we are bound and determined to make that happen.
- We'll have to wrangle Ed into
one of these conversations in the future.
Thank you two for that.
Diving
into our next question,
if anyone has been to a light rail opening in this region in the last few years
in downtown Redmond, or the two line opening or to Lynnwood,
the crowds there, you see people are so excited for this.
They want these projects so badly.
We here at TCC
are trying to amplify that excitement and the message that riders are sending
to the Sound Transit Board and staff that we need to build the damn trains.
We need to deliver these
the conversations right now, around the enterprise initiative,
in the press have been around cutting projects, and we saw that that was
what was taken back in 2003 when we faced similar challenges with Sound Move.
We know that cutting projects isn't the only solution,
and it's not the first one we should jump to.
So can you two share?
How can we get more money
or be more flexible with the funds that we have to deliver these projects?
- So first of all, I view our our current challenge as figuring out
how to do the thing voters mandated within the revenues
the voters have given us over the course of several elections.
And that is, a discipline I think we need all collectively.
How how can we do this? It may, in the end, turn out that we need
additional funds to be able to deliver some of the, desired
but unaffordable items, or to maybe deliver
some of the extensions sooner than we otherwise would be able to do.
But our job right now is to do the really hard work to figure out
if we can, in fact, deliver Sound Transit three and provide the service
and the maintenance within the funds available.
Now, funds available includes
federal funds, and that is a great unknown at the moment.
So we just have to factor that into our thinking.
But as I said before, we are enormously fortunate that the voters of this region
have provided us an ongoing, stream of revenue,
unlike what most transit agencies in this country have.
And our first responsibility
is to figure out how to do the job with the revenue they've given us.
Now, in terms of cutting projects, I, I want I really want Terri to talk a little bit
more about the work her team has been doing and identifying
ways that we can accomplish the purposes that the voters,
set out in Sound Transit three, for example,
with out,
having to to, to do that,
by doing things differently,
by innovating, by being smarter,
by taking a different look at how we get to the results.
And, Terri,
if you could just share a little bit about the work your team's been doing.
Sure.
So, last year when I mentioned the motion that was brought forward
for a cost to work plan, and it asked us to look at opportunities
to be more efficient, on a program like this, you can imagine there
there are hundreds of things that we can start to contemplate.
We developed what we call an opportunity register.
It is what it sounds like, but it is a, a formal way
on how we capture what we think.
A benefit is a cost saving measure.
There could be other benefits as well.
Like, do constructing a little differently to have less impact on the community.
And, we start to do that for every single project in a very methodical way.
And there are there are
hundreds of unique, opportunities
to be more efficient on the projects.
And you probably have heard that kind of an approach before,
something that we also did that I think was unique
is there are programmatic or portfolio opportunities
that will provide benefits and savings across the entire portfolio.
So there's project specific, there's a portfolio, opportunities.
Each of those has a cost target.
I will tell you, I think right now we have about 585,
opportunities in the register.
Not all of the opportunities will go forward and be able to be implemented.
So some of those are going to be assessed and those are going to have we're going
to look at those and say, yep, that's just not going to work.
It's not going to provide the benefit that we think it is
maybe for an operational region, the reason we can implement that.
So those get set aside, obviously document is so we know that if that question
gets asked, we can go back and look at that opportunity.
And then there are others
that obviously go forward and get assessed and implemented.
Just to make things a little bit more nuanced here,
we're also looking at these opportunities through
four different lenses or what we call levers.
So lever one is the project, or I'm sorry,
you know, the project level, opportunities that the project team can decide upon.
Again, that might be materiality and might be the sequencing
of construction, those types of things that we can go ahead and implement.
The lever two opportunities are where
we have to work across the, the agency to validate.
So these would be where we have to work with our service delivery
or operational partners to make sure that that's not going to do
something detrimental to our operations or maybe have a cost impact.
You know, residual cost impact that we want to avoid.
So, that's number two and number three and four is if we start
looking at scope, with the board.
But there I think the point of, of why CEO Constantine
wanted me to cover this is that there is a number
of different scenarios and opportunities that we're looking at.
That doesn't necessarily mean we need to start going in
and cutting projects and using kind of a, a blunt instrument to do that.
We also have a scenario tool where we're able to look at different
combinations of these opportunities to see what the outcome
is going to be again, so we can make the most informed decisions
and not look at things on a project by project basis, but really more of
kind of a systematic, like an ecosystem for, for our our expansion program.
- Thanks for that.
We're diving into our last questions and our moderated session.
So if you have a question, please write it down
and make sure you get it to one of our TCC staff members.
And we'll dive into those in just, two questions.
So, Terri this next question is for you.
All this work is going to take people, I'd love to learn.
What is your strategy to ensure we have the workforce and the resources
needed to deliver these projects on time and deliver the service that people want?
- Yeah, that's a that's a great question.
First off,
there's been a tremendous amount of investment in Sound Transit staff.
Whether it be, now understanding a new methodology
like progressive design, build on making sure that we get the training,
we have the experts in-house that can do this type of work.
So, and also on the soft skills,
I spoke a little bit about collaborative delivery.
Construction tends to be a little adversarial.
It's kind of,
you know, owner maybe against contractor or, you know, against the design team.
And that that is not an efficient way
to to build a project and not what we need for, for our program here.
So focusing not only on the technical skills
but on the soft skills so that we can be collaborative,
but I'm going to touch on something that, you might have seen in our boardroom,
which is our multiple award task water contracts.
You know, it just rolls off the tongue.
But, it is a contracting methodology.
Methodology where we can bring on an array
of different types of firms, whether it be small, medium and large.
They maybe they specialize in different things.
And we can utilize these firms very easily through a task order
process as opposed to individual long procurements, to help support
our work and be more efficient and be faster kind of speed to market.
But through that process, we've done some real capacity building.
Not all the work that we have at Sound Transit is light rail.
We have our system, we have our city good repair program.
We have an array of other projects.
It is a great entry point for firms that maybe haven't done work specifically
in transportation to come on board and start getting that experience.
So we can grow
the capacity of the number of firms that we have to support our work.
That is key.
Through all of our procurements, we're also asking for,
interns to be brought into our program.
These are paid positions.
We have a mentor, protege program, where we are also mentoring businesses
who haven't worked at Sound Transit before so they can understand how to work
for a public agency, how to work for Sound Transit successfully.
And, and also we're asking firms that work with us
to go into schools and provide exposure to careers in design and construction,
local schools and get kids interested in this career path.
Because for all the, you know, experts that we have in the field, in this market,
we don't have enough
people interested in going down the careers of,
you know, whether you want to be in construction
and construction manager or an architect engineer.
We just don't have that that, that supply and also with our labor partners
making sure that we're we're supporting those pre apprenticeship programs. So
we need to really focus on growing our capacity
to support all of this, significant work.
- All large
organizations need to continually renew themselves.
You can get into a rut can suffer whether it's public or private
bureaucratic malaise.
And, our job is to
really create the conditions for all of our employees
who are working at Sound Transit because they really care about the mission
and care about transit, to do their best work to contribute
based on their experience and knowledge and observations and to add value.
In that way,
we want to be an employer of choice, and we want to make sure that everyone
is enthusiastically aligned around our our vision and goals.
And in fact, we have, an all staff, retreat coming up this week,
where we're going to continue to build that spirit.
We've been very fortunate to attract, new,
exciting, innovative employees from around the country
and around the world over the course of the last year or two.
And my job is to make sure that those employees and the long time
employees who have helped build this agency are working
as one team, been able to bring in new people like, deputy CEO,
Ed , I just mentioned,
also able to promote people up through the agency, like our new, chief
safety officer, who's been in the agency for quite a long time.
And, by doing those things, we hope to make people understand that,
whether they're new or whether they've been here for many years,
they're valued, their contributions are valued.
And we are here to make it possible for them
to build the transit system that they are so enthusiastic about.
- Thank you for that.
So Dow and Terri, what do you most need from partners,
policymakers and the public to help so transit deliver on Sound Transit?
- This is is a great question because you know we
I was chair when we did Sound transit three chair of the board.
And the reason Sound Transit three was successful ultimately is because
all of the different sectors and community
groups aligned around this shared goal.
Where were they all in perfect agreement about everything?
They were not, but they understood
this is something we have to do for our region to move forward.
And so it was, you know, labor and business and education.
It was advocacy groups like TCC.
It was, all these local governments and officials, everyone,
got on board and pardon the pun, and,
helped us move forward to a successful ballot measure.
And that's what we need to be doing now as well.
It can't be. Well, we voted for that.
Go ahead, kid, and build the thing.
This is tough work.
If it wasn't tough, it would have been done a half century or more ago.
And we still need everyone's creativity, everyone's innovation,
everyone's new, bright ideas based on what they're seeing in the world today.
Not what we saw back in 2015 or 2016.
And everyone's advocacy saying that although I don't agree with everything,
I know this is an important thing for us to do, and we have to keep putting
one foot in front of the other and get it done.
The biggest thing we have going for us is momentum.
We're opening Federal Way, we're going to open Eastlink.
We're even opening a new station at 130th in North Seattle.
And we have to keep that momentum going.
And it is up to the public and the
and the public voices, for transit to help
keep the to help keep the community focused on that effort. I'm,
I'm very,
happy with the support that we receive.
Generally, when we do polling, over 80% of people are enthusiastic about light rail
and they just want more of it,
and they want it to their community and they want it yesterday.
But, that has to be organized
into the kind of, advocacy and creativity that can actually
turn into progress on building an operating system.
- I Know I agree with everything.
CEO Constantino just said, I'll just add,
we need to try to make decisions early
and then stick to those decisions and agreements.
That is only done through a real partnership.
I know one of the things we're trying to do is have more joint project offices
where we're working side by side with our partners.
So they're they're right.
They're in the thick of what's happening,
the discussions, the decision making, whatever it may be.
So it's really informed, and I also think that them, establishes,
degree of trust and kind of what
we're trying to solve for and also ownership,
sense of urgency.
Time is, is, something that we're always fighting against.
So, working efficiently,
but working, with a sense of urgency to keep everything going.
Stopping a project is always one of the most damaging things you can do.
And I will just end with, with permitting, you know, and kind of,
an getting agreement early, but working together, you know, we,
we want to be good partners.
And so, really working together to get through the permitting process
as efficiently, as we can, and to avoid surprises
down the road in the 11th hour, which are, which are really challenging.
- Permitting everyone's favorite topic. So,
but I want to go back to your point Dow.
I mean, I think we have to take a moment and appreciate
what we're doing in this region and the system that we are building.
When we look across the country, we don't see that story.
We see in New York City, where $18 billion of grants were paused
for the Second Avenue Subway and the Gateway Project.
You look to Houston and you see a mayor
there that is dismantling their bus system,
and you look to cities like Philadelphia, where the state legislature
there is imposing 45% cuts on their transit system.
For us to be expanding this system is something we need to cherish
and recognize the hard work that it takes and the coalition that it takes to move
this forward.