The King County Council held a public-comment forum on Metro’s funding yesterday, down at Union Station, and the crowd it drew, estimated at 400 people, overflowed the space. Impressive for a meeting that started at 3:30 p.m., when most people are at work.

Considered as representative of Metro’s daily boardings, each of those attendees stood for 1,000 daily rides. Some attendees were official representatives: Kate Joncas, Downtown Seattle Association president & CEO; Josh Kavanagh, University of Washington director of transportation;  Kenmore’s mayor David Baker; Lake Forest Park Council’s John Wright. (West Seattle Blog has a good coverage round-up.)

But who were the 100 or so fired-up commenters really arguing with?

Not Metro, certainly, whose boss Kevin Desmond has been as vocal as a Wagner tenor about the transit agency’s dire funding straits, which he fears could result in a 17-percent cut to Metro service. (Seattle Transit Blog boils it down for you: “There’s a $60M gap in 2014, and a combined $1.2B between 2008, when the recession began, and 2015.”)

Nor were the comments really needed to persuade the Council, whose members are saying things like this:

“People and employers need transit to get to work and make our regional economy and transportation system work.” — Larry Phillips

“As Chair of the Regional Transit Committee, I am working with this coalition to avoid gridlock, keep people and goods moving, and our regional economy growing.” — Rod Dembowski

“What we heard tonight was simple—public transit continues to be the transportation lifeblood for many in our community.” — Larry Gossett

The audience for this particular piece of political theatre is the state legislature in Olympia, as they control King County’s ability to create more stable funding mechanisms for Metro, but have been reluctant to cede that authority, despite King County’s evident willingness to pay.

As we mentioned in an earlier story, Metro’s shortfall is from temporary funding sources running out, not their inability to budget: “that [SR 99 tunnel mitigation] funding is due to end in June 2014 — the same year as a temporary $20 car-tab fee, instituted to prevent Metro service cuts, expires. The plan was to return Metro to firmer financial footing with a permanent car-tab fee but none of the signatories had the power to do that. Only the State Legislature could, and so far, they haven’t.”

What’s the hold-up? Again, Seattle Transit Blog can explain the backstory, how an Eyman initiative (that was declared unconstitutional) managed to get the legislature to gut transportation funding themselves. King County residents have since voted to increase transit funding via sales tax to the legal limit, but this has proved to have more downs than ups in a recessionary climate.

In “Throwing Metro Under the Bus,” Sightline notes that the legislature’s inaction on behalf on elderly and/or disabled people, students, and commuters is in part because transit budgets are small fish in the larger transportation mega-project pond:

Here’s what Metro most wants: The state Legislature to give King County the authority to levy a new (up to) 1.5% Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (MVET), which would be split 40% for roads and 60% for transit. An owner of a car worth $10,000 would pay $150 a year, and the tax would generate about $85 million for Metro and $55 million for road maintenance.

Right now that MVET option for King County is frustratingly embedded in HB1954, a larger transportation revenue package that puts highway mega-projects ahead of virtually everything else (we and others have enumerated its terribleness here and here). It’s still alive in the special session that just started in Olympia this week, but it’s fate is very much up in the air.

Maybe it would help if the legislature envisioned funding a 28-lane freeway, instead. Those interested in weighing in can contact Washington State senators here, representatives here.