Voters will decide the issue in February, to expand links from Kitsap to Seattle.

Voters in February will decide a sales tax hike to fund foot-ferry service linking Bremerton, Kingston, Port Orchard and Southworth with downtown Seattle.

Kitsap Transit will ask voters for a three-tenths of a cent sales tax increase, to restore ferry service abandoned by the state and generally unprofitable in private hands.

“People are beginning to see all the homework come together, and I think they’re starting to see we are the right people,” said Richard Hayes, Kitsap Transit executive director.

The funding would allow Kitsap Transit to manage the foot-ferry service with several private outfits as operators.

Riders would see vessels in two sizes – 149 passengers and 80 passengers, depending on the route and time of day – with crossing times of 30 minutes or less, and fares of $7-9 per round trip.

Three “rush-hour” trips in the morning and evening could eventually be offered from each of the four ports.

Passenger-only service fell to the wayside in 2003 after Initiative 695 eliminated the state Motor Vehicle Excise Tax and punched a corresponding hole in the Washington State Ferries budget.

Since that time, several private operators have tried to restore service with only marginal success.

A direct route between Kingston and downtown Seattle earned good reviews but failed for want of ridership, apparently because of high fares. Another private outfit established service between Bremerton and Seattle, but recently curtailed service to a single run in the morning and one in the afternoon.

If the February funding measure passes, those operators would be enlisted to provide service under Kitsap Transit’s management and subsidy.

“Our premise all along has been that you need a partnership,” Hayes said.

While the routes will not directly serve Bainbridge Island, enhanced service county-wide is seen as a way to cut down cross-island automobile traffic from peninsula commuters who now use the Winlsow terminal to reach Seattle.

It will be Kitsap Transit’s second attempt at a tax hike for foot-ferry service. In 2003, a similar measure earned just 38 percent at the polls.

Hayes said the political climate has changed since that time, as it’s become clear that state doesn’t want to re-establish the service through Washing­ton State Ferries. Hopes that private operators could make a go of it without a public subsidy also proved unfounded.

“That’s been disproven all over the country,” Hayes said. “I don’t know why we had to go through proving it all over again, but we did.”

Kitsap Transit’s hopes are buttressed by recent polling. Transit board members last week heard the results of an 800-respondent, random telephone survey conducted on the Kitsap Transit Draft Passenger-Only Ferry Investment Plan.

Some of the findings include :

• 90 percent of Kitsap County respondents – including those who do not regularly commute across Puget Sound – agreed with the importance of direct, fast connections to jobs in King County.

• 82 percent said they support public transportation, and said that passenger only ferries are a natural and necessary evolution of the transportation system.

• 68 percent of longtime Kitsap residents who have witnessed the on-again/off-again foot-ferry service support a locally controlled service.

• 59 percent of respondents countywide said they support a three-tenths of 1 cent local sales tax to support Kitsap-based passenger ferry service.

As the tax measure is readied, Kitsap Transit is also considering narrowing its official service area, concentrating routed service in the urbanizing areas of the county including all of Bainbridge.

Vanpool and ACCESS service for the disabled would still be provided in the outlying areas of the county.

The Kitsap Transit board, which includes Mayor Darlene Kordonowy, is expected to decide on that issue Dec. 12.

Kitsap Transit and a private boat designer have been testing low-wake vessels in Rich Passage to obviate concerns over wake damage to shorelines. Should the funding measure pass, those vessels could come on line as early as next fall, Hayes said.

The agency now operates a foot-ferry between Bremerton and Port Orchard, which Hayes said has seen a 35 percent increase in ridership in three years under its management.

“We can defeat any assumptions that we don’t know how to run passenger-only ferry service,” he said.

(Kitsap News Group writer Tracey Cooper contributed to this report.)