I just returned from our meeting on Pierce Transit Board representation. This process was necessitated by the reduction of their service area. We have decided to make a change in the board’s composition.
Currently the 9 seats on the Pierce Transit board are divided as follows: Tacoma 3, Pierce County, Lakewood 1, Puyallup & UP share a seat, and the remaining cities share 1.
The new configuration will be Tacoma 2, Pierce County 2, Lakewood 1, Puyallup 1, UP 1, Fife/Milton/Edgewood 1, remaining cities 1.
The hope is to reach out to as much of the service area as possible while also recognizing that Tacoma is both the transportation and economic hub of the county. It also has the largest number of people who are dependent upon transit.
This entire process has been, at least in my eyes, about making the organization sustainable and hopefully improve the quality of service to its customers. But there also is an element I think of trying to instill more trust in Pierce Transit all across its service area. This feels like a big step in that direction.
That trust is also a two way street. The larger jurisdictions will need to have faith in us to do the right thing so I hope we can all show that kind of regional approach.
You know Derek, this was a piss poor decision that jeopardizes the agency’s opportunity to go back to the ballot. Two seats for a city of 200,000 people and the vast majority of riders is a total power grab. It’s awful and not representative. There was no public notice regarding this – at all. This decision was an affront to public process.
Hi Chris,
I can’t speak to any noticing issues. That would be handled by Pierce Transit.
I can understand why you’d be concerned by a “power grab” and hope that’s not actually the case. It’s certainly not my intent for it to block any ballot access. In fact I hope it helps build trust in PT.
We need this system to work and everyone at the table seemed committed to that goal.
Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to talk about it.
Derek, you may have had great intentions, but this breakout of the board members is clearly skewed in favor of small suburban towns. Given the population of the new boundary (~566,000), each of the nine board members should represent roughly 61,000 people.
That gives Tacoma 3
The County 3
Lakewood 1
UP/Puyallup 1 and
Small cities 1
Under such an allocation, Tacoma residents are still somewhat underrepresented because our population is closer to 200,000 rather than 183,000.
Instead, with the new framework each of Tacoma’s representatives will now hear the concerns of 100,000 people, while the Fife/Milton/Edgewood representative will represent fewer than 30,000 people. This is a grave discrepancy that grants those residents disproportionate amounts of power over Tacoma tax dollars – which account for half of Pierce Transit’s sales tax revenue.
I’m aware of the population discrepancy. Keep in mind that the County typically sends members from Tacoma as well. It’s not like their “unincorporated” representation has actually represented unincorporated areas. I wasn’t particularly interested in reducing Tacoma’s representation but that’s what the bulk of the body wanted to do in order to get more views at the table. Let’s keep in mind the current model is one which hasn’t exactly worked well.
If someone tries to take advantage of this to hurt transit I promise a bunch of people will fight like hell to stop them. Myself included. But if we want to reach out to areas outside of Tacoma, this is one way to do so.
[...] Transit over the last several months, you probably have noticed I’ve increasingly turned my interest to that agency and its financial health. Last month I decided to take the next step and was elected [...]