The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) appears poised to rescind one of the biggest federal transit grants awarded in the Puget Sound region in recent years. A $25 million grant for Sound Transit’s Graham Street infill station, which would add a new 1 Line light rail stop between Othello and Columbia City, was announced weeks before the second Trump Administration came into office, but it could now vanish.
The grant is being swept up in an overall review of competitive grants awarded during the Biden Administration that have not yet been “fully obligated.” Last week USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy’s office announced that it was ordering a project level review across all of the department’s grant programs, via a memo that was first reported by transportation reporter Yonah Freemark of Urban Institute.
Duffy’s memo directs the agency to examine any project elements that either “purposefully improve the condition for [environmental justice] communities or actively reduce GHG emissions.” That’s on top of flagging any project activities that involve “green infrastructure or bicycle infrastructure.” The memo seems to target funding geared not only toward improving mobility, but also for improving safety for people who aren’t in cars.
As a new station intended to improve transit access in South Seattle, Graham Street checks many of the boxes listed in the memo. Along with filling in a conspicuous gap in the transit network for Southeast Seattle residents, the project is also planned to include upgrades to pedestrian infrastructure, with bicycle infrastructure upgrades planned by the City of Seattle as part of the Seattle Transportation Plan.
The Urbanist reported just this week on Sound Transit’s recent work to advance planning for Graham Street station, which has been moving forward since 1999. With a projected cost of $118 million, the station is expected to open by 2031, but a pullback in pledged grant funding could jeopardize that timeline. Any further delays could further impact nearby residents who argue that they’ve been left behind by the continued build out of Sound Transit’s light rail network.
When the grant award was announced in early January by the Biden Administration, the announcement touted the project as both containing a big equity component as well as being a climate project, two concepts that are now being fully rejected by the Trump Administration.
“The project will improve safety by protecting non-motorized travelers from safety risks in an underserved community,” the project sheet noted. “The project will reduce transportation-related air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in an underserved community, incorporate LEED Gold standards, reduce stormwater pollution, and focus on reducing construction emissions and embodied carbon. The project will increase affordable transportation choices by improving and expanding active transportation usage or significantly reducing vehicle dependence.”
Graham Street is far from the only project in the region that could be impacted: late last week the Seattle Times detailed other projects that could potentially have funds pulled back, including another $25 million award to King County Parks in 2024 for a segment of the Eastrail regional trail in Bellevue. Many of the actions taken by the incoming administration have been unprecedented, indicating that no funding is truly safe. However, many of those projects do have signed grant agreements with USDOT.
On the other hand, Sound Transit’s award is in the crosshairs, given the fact that the agency has not yet signed any grant agreement, as The Urbanist confirmed late last week. Sound Transit spokesperson David Jackson says that Graham Street is the only project it has been identified as falling under the scope of the new guidance, and that the agency is still assessing how to proceed.
“Sound Transit will continue gather information on how this new guidance may, or may not, affect the RAISE grant for Graham Street Station,” Jackson said. The Urbanist has not yet identified any projects around the region that are as much at risk as this one.
The agency said it’s too early to know exactly how a pullback in federal funds could impact Graham Street specifically. “ST is still analyzing this new competitive grant guidance and how it may or may not affect project scope should there be a grant revision,” Jackson said.
This announcement comes on the heels of USDOT pushing back the expected release date for its approval of the first major ST3 project planned to start construction, West Seattle Link. While the timeline to release a Record of Decision has only been pushed back two months, the move signaled additional headwinds that Sound Transit is going to face during the next four years with a new federal administration that’s increasingly hostile to transit. With Project 2025 explicitly calling for a reduction in federal support for public transit, the long-term impact is likely to be severe and long-lasting — especially if Republicans continue to hold the White House.
Representative Rick Larsen, who represents a portion of the Sound Transit taxing district in Snohomish County and serves as the ranking member on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has come out swinging against Duffy’s memo. Larsen has been focused on the impact of the memo on pedestrian and bicycle safety projects, which could be significant. He’s argued that the guardrails that were included in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which funded all of these grant programs, are being disregarded. But he has stopped short of calling the move illegal.
“I’ll let the courts decide what’s legal or not legal,” Larsen told Streetsblog this week. “But my argument about why the administration is wrong is that when Congress wrote the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we specifically we put in programs for safe routes to schools and safe city streets; [we wanted there to be] federal money to fund safe ways for people to get around.”
While the impact radius of the Trump Administration’s path of destruction is almost certainly going to be wide-ranging, Graham Street looks to be an early warning sign.
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
