Seattle Forfeits $7.3 Million Grant for Stalled Out First Avenue Streetcar Project

The City of Seattle is officially on track to return $7.3 million in grant funding that had originally been awarded to the Cultural Connector Streetcar, formerly called the Center City Connector, after a local match to advance project plans was not included in the City’s 2024 budget. The impending return of funds was previously reported by The Urbanist in October, but did not come up during council budget deliberations this fall either in briefings by the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) or the city council’s independent staff.

Confirmation that the funding would be reallocated to other projects came at this week’s meeting of the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) caucus, which meets regularly to discuss timelines for grant-funded transit projects and approve extensions. The two total grants for the Seattle streetcar project, awarded through PSRC via the FTA’s Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program, had originally been earmarked for acquisition of new streetcar vehicles. But with the project’s substantial delays, the regional planning organization approved a switch, allowing the funds to instead be used to update the streetcar’s design plans.

But that plan required Seattle to provide a local match to fund design, and without it the grant timeline could not be extended any longer.

“The city council and the mayor passed a budget that did not include that funding,” SDOT planner Chris Eilerman told the FTA caucus Wednesday. “March 2024 was the deadline that we were looking to have that funding obligated with the local match. Based on the budget process we’re not going to be able to meet that deadline… it’s our expectation that that money will get reprogrammed.”

https://www.theurbanist.org/2023/12/14/seattle-forfeits-7-3-million-grant-for-stalled-out-first-avenue-streetcar-project/

Kind of redundant in my opinion. We already have the Link Light Rail connecting the two existing streetcar lines at Westlake and at The International District/ Chinatown stations.

The City Center Connector would travel down First Ave while the Link runs underground down Third.