(Image courtesy Washington State Ferries)
Washington State Ferries will have to change its practices to reach staffing sustainability, according to consultants reporting to state lawmakers.
Staffing shortages have led to a lot of canceled sailings in recent months, and Scott Nostaja with Segal Consulting says it’s because the ferries operate on Coast Guard minimums with little cushion. He says that results in a lot of overtime to keep minimum crews. Nostaja says, “Hiring an additional number of workers – full-time employees into the ferries – you’ll actually reduce your overall costs by somewhere between $5 and $8 million dollars a year.”
Among the other issues before the Joint Transportation Committee: a lack of diversity in the ferry workforce, which Nostaja and others blame on barriers – primarily, the high cost of credentialing and seeing specific doctors qualified by the Coast Guard to give applicants and mariners a physical. “They estimated the cost to be around $500,” Nostaja says, “For people in underserved communities applying for jobs at the ferries, that’s a heavy load.”
Committee member, State Representative Debra Entenman (D-Covington), says she encouraged people in her district to apply for State Ferry jobs. They came back and told her about both those high costs and how difficult it is to navigate and even just to find the application buried on the website. So Entenman says she applied to be a ticket taker, went through the effort and expense of getting her certification and physical, and she says she is still waiting to “engage” with the ferry service.
Nostaja says these problems can be solved, but he says some involve Coast Guard regulations and some union contract bargaining as they try to modernize the system. He says they are talking to the unions about working with them to make the much needed changes.
A one-hour train ride from Seattle to Portland or Vancouver, B-C, is likely in your future, so the Committee also heard an update on high-speed rail.
Building a high-speed rail on the Cascadia Corridor has its challenges, from acquiring land that might not be easy to get to how many people might actually use it. Consultant Greg Spitz with Resource Systems Group says we need to consider trade-offs, like runs that are not the fastest but fast enough to attract more riders. He tells the Committee a key is the ability to compete with cars, buses and planes, but that ridership will also need to be enough to cover operating costs without government subsidies. Washington and Oregon subsidize Amtrak to cover operating costs not met by ticket sales.
Spitz did a lot of comparison with California’s high-speed rail nightmare, which has seen the cost go from $33-billion to $105-billion in about 10 years with not one train traveling a single inch on the tracks yet. The last Cascadia high-speed rail cost estimates are from 2017-2017 and range from $24-billion to $42-billion. That estimate in no way accounts for the higher costs caused by inflation, labor shortages, truck driver shortages and other factors.
The biggest pitfall for California’s project has been land acquisition, with a lot of politics involved that led to a track that zigs and zags through the Central Valley because of land owners who sought favors from elected officials. Spitz says they should absolutely take lessons learned from California’s high-speed rail – both the good and the bad.
You can watch TVW’s coverage of the entire hearing by clicking here.
