A Description of These Sound Transit Contract Documents and Sound Transit 2016 Administrative

April 20, 2016

A Description of these Sound Transit contract documents and Sound Transit 2016 Administrative Budget.

Public Disclosure Request

In June of 2015 a public disclosure request was made to Sound Transit for all their contracts over $100,000. Several additional requests were made based on the first. Some are attached.

Methodology

Using the original document, an analysis was done of general categories these contracts could fall into and where the vendor was located. In order to make that easier, multiple contracts with the same vendor were combined. We used their websites to determine category and location.

Findings

Other Governments in the Region

Many other governments in the Region are receivingmoney from Sound Transit. The amount is $482,351,310. This may include some construction cost.

This is in addition to the contracting out of all their bus and light rail service to Metro, Pierce and Community Transit which was $905,727,819

a. Are taxpayers now paying for two administrative overhead costs to run basically the routes that we had before ST took them over?

b. These riders are now counted toward ST ridership. The public is not made aware of the fact that most of ST claimed ridership are not new riders.

2. Business, strategic planning and other consultantsnot including engineering and architecture = $24,481,644

Finance and It

In addition to their own Finance/IT department of 150 people =

$39,728,421 for IT contracts and $14,276,179 for Finance contracts

Legal

In addition to their own legal department of 16 lawyers –

$34,459,695in legal contracts. Does not count smaller retainer fees.

In Contrast

Their donations to non-profits for fare subsidy pales in comparison only $396,083 going to three local non-profits.

Office Equipment/Furniture = $6,343,962/ $7,172,677

Real Estate services= $36,893,132

We are not sure how much of that includes actual purchase of land.

Safety and security services = $90,252,281

It would be interesting to contrast this with Metro’s expenditures for security.Would a fraction of that amount of money provide security to many of the high incident routes on local transit?

Extra Staffingin addition to their 600-748 (over time) agency staff =

$17,264,429

Public relations/advertising, surveys, other marketing =

$37,653,380

In addition, they paid KUOW and KPLU $439,000 for advertising. \

How is it possible for PSRC, WSDOT, King County and the cities suppose to provide any objective pushback or pose questions when they are getting millions of dollars from ST?Virtually every news outlet has received money for advertising.

Red highlighted rows: These are contracts that raised a question.

Every effort has been made to accurately report these numbers and categories. Lastly, these are only the contracts for over $100,000 from 07 – 6.15. Given the level of advertising and public relations that has occurred just since January and will continue through the election cycle, these numbers for advertising have, no doubt, risen considerably.

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