SB5042 – Base car tab fees for Sound Transit expansion funding on Kelley Blue Book or national automobile dealers’ association values.
Prime Sponsor – Senator O’Ban (R, 24th District, Southern Pierce County)
Current status – Scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Committee on Transportation, February 26th at 1:30. Still in committee by 2019 cutoff; reintroduced and retained in present status for 2020 session.
Next step would be –  Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

My Comments:
The $54 Billion Sound Transit expansion package voters passed in 2016 included about $8 Billion in funding from an increase in car tab fees. The measure based the fees on the older of the existing valuation systems, which produced large increases from the previous year, and a lot of complaints. Last year, bills to reduce the fees in two different ways passed the Senate (SB5955) and the House (HB2201) with large majorities, but nothing reached the Governor.

Whatever its other virtues, the expansion is an 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.