 Watch our Draft EIS project video
Thank you to everyone who attended our virtual and in-person Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) public meetings in March! We enjoyed sharing information with you about the project and answering questions about our environmental analysis.
The comment period is not over! You still have time to submit your feedback on the Draft EIS. If you have remaining questions about the document, you can send an email to our project inbox or sign up for a 20-minute video conference call with one of our staff. We’ll answer your questions and go over the various methods for commenting on the document.
We’re also out in the community answering questions about the project, so feel free to stop by one of these events in April.
The deadline for Draft EIS comments is April 28. Comments may include why you’re interested or concerned with certain aspects of the project, or why you might prefer one alternative over another. The more specific you can make your comments, the more helpful they’ll be.
There are a number of ways you can comment:
- Email comments to WSBLEDEIScomments@soundtransit.org or submit directly through our Online Open House
- Leave a voicemail comment at (800) 471-0879
- Mail comments to:
WSBLE Draft Environmental Impact Statement Comments
c/o Lauren Swift
Sound Transit
401 S. Jackson St.
Seattle, WA 98104
Comments can be submitted in any language and will be translated.
Read the Draft EIS document
Where can I read the Draft EIS?
- Online at https://wsblink.participate.online.
- Purchase a printed copy: printed copies of the Draft EIS are available for $25. Printed copies of Technical Reports are available for $15 each. To request printed copies, contact Dominique Jones at 206-689-4783 or dominique.jones@soundtransit.org.
- Executive summaries are printed in multiple languages and are free. To request an executive summary, contact Dominique Jones at 206-689-4783 or dominique.jones@soundtransit.org.
- Visit a reading room, a community center, or Sound Transit Headquarters:
- At Sound Transit Headquarters: 401 S. Jackson St., Seattle. Call 206-398-5344 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday – Friday to arrange an appointment.
- At a public reading room location at over 20 libraries and community centers.
Your comments will help the Sound Transit Board of Directors confirm or modify the preferred alternative later this year. Sound Transit’s responses to comments will be published in the Final EIS, expected in 2023.
Potential cost savings and refinement ideas
In August of 2021, Sound Transit adopted a realignment plan in response to rising real estate and construction costs. The plan outlines a flexible framework and ambitious targets for delivering transit expansion projects as quickly as possible, while estimating affordable delivery dates for each project under current revenue and cost projections.
The West Seattle and Ballard Link Extensions (WSBLE) project is one of those projects, with an estimated project level affordability gap of $1.8B dollars, based on current financial projections and cost estimates. For the WSBLE project, the target schedule for delivering light rail service from Downtown to West Seattle is 2032 and downtown to Ballard in 2037. However, if it is not possible to close the affordability gap, current financial assumptions reflect it is affordable to open service to Smith Cove in 2037 and to Ballard in 2039.
Starting with this month’s Community Advisory Group meetings, Sound Transit will be sharing potential cost savings and refinement ideas for the WSBLE project with the public as part of broader agency efforts to intensively seek additional financial capacity and reduce costs. These concepts are preliminary and are not studied at the level of the alternatives studied in the Draft EIS. Community feedback, along with all of the public and agency comments, will be provided to the Sound Transit Board to inform their direction on whether any of these ideas should be evaluated further.
Watch a Community Advisory Group meeting to learn more about possible cost savings and refinements.
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