SB5043 – Authorizes putting measures that would cancel any of the Sound Transit taxes in a county on its ballot by petition.
Prime Sponsor – Senator O’Ban (R, 24th District, Southern Pierce County)
Current status – Referred to Transportation Committee. Still in committee by 2019 cutoff; reintroduced and retained in present status for 2020 session.
Next step would be –  Scheduling a hearing.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

– Authorizes a county’s voters to opt out of all the funding sources in the Sound Transit expansion package approved by regional voters in 2016, and apparently also to opt out of any other previous Sound Transit funding measures.

My Comments:
Here’s the results of the 2016 vote, compared with  the boundaries of Senator O’Ban’s district. (The green areas at the bottom of the voting results map are the military bases in the southwest area of the district.)

Whatever its other virtues, the expansion is a very expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Sound Transit estimates that most of the riders will be people who would have been riding buses otherwise, rather than people shifting to light rail from cars.) The Washington Policy Center pointed out that Sound Transit’s estimates for the planned extension from Northgate to Lynwood imply a cost of $612/metric ton of anticipated reductions, without considering emissions from construction or operating costs. (They did not take account of the value of the other benefits that the expansion will produce, like savings in commuter time; those might be what the money’s paying for, and the CO2 reductions might just be icing on the cake.) KUOW reported the additional emissions from construction steel and concrete.

Details:
Would require the signatures of 8% of the voters in the last election for Governor to put a measure on the ballot.