Edmonds senator leads transportation committee. What's on the agenda?

If it were up to him, Sen. Marko Liias would focus solely on traffic safety in the 2024 legislative session. But as the cost of highway projects and fish passages has skyrocketed, next year’s transportation agenda has been rewritten in recent months, forcing lawmakers to take a second look at their budgets and timelines for delivering long-promised projects.

“There’s some stuff we have to talk about, which is how to land the plane, so to speak, on these big projects,” said Liias, D-Edmonds, chair of the Senate Transportation Committee.

Less than two years ago, the Legislature passed a momentous, $17 billion transportation funding measure. It was billed as a means to finally deliver on highway megaprojects while improving transit across the state. Now, lawmakers are forced to watch as the ambitions the package contained dwindle as costs rise.

Safety will still be a topic of conversation when the session begins Jan. 8. The state is on pace to match or even exceed last year’s 740 traffic deaths, a number that itself was a more than 30-year high.

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