Sound Transit’s ‘emergency’ light rail contract goes to CEO’s former firm

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Sound Transit CEO Goran Sparrman’s former employer, the giant engineering company HNTB, is going to be paid $1.5 million to help solve frequent light rail stalls, without having to compete with other bidders.

Transit staff said Sparrman left the choice of contractors to the agency’s professional procurement staff, to avoid any whiff of favoritism. Sparrman promised to do so while joining Sound Transit last January. Before that, he worked five years at HNTB as a vice president tasked with recruiting and keeping clients.

Sparrman declared this week that ongoing service disruptions were an emergency, and on Thursday, Sound Transit’s governing board unanimously ratified that finding — which allows the CEO to fast-track spending on the HNTB design work.

Train stalls and power outages have undermined light rail’s most hyped virtue, its reliability compared to sitting in traffic. Trains were delayed or blocked during 6% of all service hours, during 166 incidents from January to November 2024.

“This is another step on how we are taking Link reliability issues extremely seriously and how we have no time to waste, in getting to the reliability and dependability that our customers expect,” Sparrman told transit board members Thursday.

Before the meeting, Sparrman said staff led by Moises Gutierrez, deputy CEO for oversight, forged the deal with HNTB, which has done hundreds of millions of dollars in business with Sound Transit over a quarter-century.

“There are multiple guidelines in place to ensure there is an appropriate firewall between HNTB and Goran. We followed those for this process,” said spokesperson John Gallagher. HNTB’s work order, to be completed by a procurement officer in the coming days, before Sparrman’s final signoff, will be an addendum to a $5.6 million contract in 2022 with HNTB for light rail operations modeling, Gallagher said.

Brian Holloway, Sound Transit director of infrastructure engineering, told board members that hiring HNTB offers the best opportunity for success. None posed questions about CEO/contractor ties.

Open bidding is subject to regulations aimed at a level playing field, including the right to appeal for firms that lose out.

In skipping that step, Sparrman’s staff report said failure to act immediately to design light rail improvements “will threaten proper systemwide performance and could compromise safety protocols.”

A bigger, long-term contract for repair work will be sent to open bidding and exclude HNTB, the report said.

Even at $1.5 million, the agreement with HNTB is minor compared to the company’s portfolio of Sound Transit work. That includes $24.6 million in construction-management services for park-and-ride garages in Kent, Auburn, Puyallup and Sumner; a potential $327 million for preliminary engineering, design and redevelopment of future West Seattle and Ballard light rail corridors; and a $104 million partnership between HNTB and Jacobs Engineering Group to design the new Northgate-Lynnwood extension. HNTB was the lead designer for the Highway 99 tunnel.

Based in Kansas City, Mo., the company earned $1.9 billion gross revenue during 2023, according to Engineering News-Record.

As an executive in the firm’s Bellevue-Seattle region, Sparrman worked behind the scenes after runaway cracks shut the West Seattle Bridge in 2020. HNTB proposed twin steel-arch replacement spans within 3½ years for $522 million or cheaper — a rosy assumption then-Mayor Jenny Durkan rejected in favor of strengthening the 40-year-old concrete bridge, where traffic returned in September 2022.

Sparrman, a professional engineer, also previously headed the Bellevue and Seattle departments of transportation. He planned to retire last month, but the Sound Transit board, pleased with his performance, extended the relationship through at least May, at an annual salary of $500,000.

Sound Transit operates the 33-mile 1 Line that serves 100,000 daily riders between Lynnwood, Seattle and SeaTac, and a short Eastside starter line. Redmond, Seattle-to-Bellevue, and Federal Way extensions are set to open this year and next.

The spate of light rail delays resumed Thursday morning, when a stalled train’s control panel shutdown at International District/Chinatown Station caused half-hour delays and single tracking downtown.

In describing HNTB’s upcoming research, Holloway, Sound Transit’s director of infrastructure engineering, told board members the existing network contains “single points of failure,” in which it’s extremely difficult to find a backup plan to sustain full service when one part fails.