FREE s Friday, September 27, 2013
FOOTBALL RECAPS A6
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TACOMA FILM FESTIVAL B1
Y TACOMAWEEKL.com YOUR COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER - 26 YEARS OF SERVICE
SUPREME COURT VISITS TACOMA FOR PUBLIC HEARINGS Court hears three appeals to criminal convictions By Steve Dunkelberger stevedunkel@tacomaweekly.com
PHOTO BY STEVE DUNKELBERGER
SHE RULES. Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara Madsen is the first
female Chief Justice of the state’s highest court and presides at a time when the majority of the justices are women, another first. The Supreme Court held a traveling hearing of cases at University of Puget Sound.
WHAT’S RIGHT WITH TACOMA
Washington’s State Supreme Court held a public hearing on three actual court cases for students and legal eagles to view on the campus of University of Puget Sound last week. The current Supreme Court is at an historic point on two counts. Chief Justice Barbara Madsen is the first female Chief Justice of the state’s highest court. She presides at a time when the majority of the justices are women, another
first. The high court last visited Tacoma in May 2005 at Tacoma Community College. They also visited the Puyallup campus of Pierce College in 2009. The recent “have gavel, will travel” event at UPS was meant to provide the public the opportunity to observe the justice system in action and to pose non-case related questions to the nine judges. This “traveling court” is part of the Supreme Court’s policy of providing open access to communities. X See SUPREME COURT / page A5
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LINK FARES ARE ON THE WAY
PHOTO BY STEVE DUNKELBERGER
LINK. Tacoma’s 1.6-mile Link rail
line has been the only Sounder service that is free to riders. That won’t last long. By Steve Dunkelberger stevedunkel@tacomaweekly.com
PHOTOS COMPLIMENTS OF ASSOCIATED MINISTRIES AND MARLENE CARRILLO
TRANSFORMED. (Top) Carol Byrne and her children, from left, David, Luke, Benjamin and Moriah, teamed up with
other youth volunteers to transform their home. They scraped the peeling white paint and upgraded it – and the neighborhood – with fresh colors. (Right) The Byrnes and Marlene Carrillo’s family mustered young volunteers, including students and members of Young Business Men, for a summer of painting.
MOM POWER REFRESHES PAINT TACOMA-PIERCENEWBEAUTIFUL YOUNG PEOPLE LEAD THE WAY PARTNERSHIPS FORGED
By Kathleen Merryman At 29, Paint Tacoma-Pierce Beautiful is getting younger. This summer, it expanded its pool of eligible homeowners, and in doing so it attracted teams of young volunteers rounded up by Moms. That Mom-power is a fresh force in the program that has, by painting one house at a time, raised the standards for neighborhoods all over the county. Before Amy Allison and
Megan Shea took over leadership of the Associated Ministries program, volunteers painted homes for owners who were low-income and senior or disabled. This summer, they opened it up to all lowincome homeowners. Allison and Shea hit their Matterhorn of a learning curve relying on veteran team leaders to acquaint them with the mechanics of choosing houses, ordering and sorting supplies and motivating teams. Between them, John and Mary Herem, Roy Kilgore, Joyce Schuetz, Caleb Orr, Marv Sandberg, and Jay Langford brought X See PAINT / page A4
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WAR ON GRAFFITI: The pilot effort will focus on graffiti removal around the main entrances to the city. PAGE A3
Girls Soccer A7
Pothole Pig ...............A2 Crime Stoppers.........A3
Arthur Migliazza B5
A report drafted by Sound Transit recommends that Tacoma’s Link light rail line from the Tacoma Dome to the Theater District start charging riders. A Sound Transit Board vote on the issue was set for Thursday, so results were not available at press time but will be available online. What is clear is that free rides on the Link are ending. At issue now is the fare, between $1 and $2 a trip or double that amount for a round trip that also works as a day pass. The driver behind the switch from free to paid is the fact that the 10-yearold Link is popular, tallying more than a million riders last year. Until now, the cost of collecting fares would be higher than the money they would bring in. That changed last year, when ridership topped a million passenger trips. A Sound Transit Board decision has held that services would be free as long as it would cost more to collect fares than the system would make in ticket sales. Link has reached that point. A policy goal of having ridership revenue make up 20 percent of the route’s budget folds into the decision as well. But revenue from ridership isn’t a straight calculation. The higher the cost for tickets, the fewer riders the Link will have. If one-way tickets cost $1.50, for example, ridership would drop by about 30 percent, down from a million to 693,000 riders a year, according to Sound Transit analysis. At that ridership volume, it would take between one and four years just to recoup the cost of installing the $500,000 ticketing system. The variation depends on the fare rates and the system Sound Transit adopts to mitigate impact the fares would have on low-income people who might qualify X See LINK / page A4
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