King County Executive Dow Constantine and Bellevue Mayor Claudia Balducci joined together over the Interstate 90 bridge on Monday to announce a tentative agreement with Sound Transit for East Link light rail service that will save the city of Bellevue $60 million in contingency costs following construction of a downtown tunnel.

The city ramped up negotiations with Sound Transit six months ago to amend a 2011 memorandum of understanding between the two entities, which had been a point of contention since before the transit agency announced the Bel-Red corridor as its preferred site for an operations and maintenance satellite facility. Deputy Mayor Kevin Wallace had repeated publicly that the city’s financial contribution to the East Link project should be scaled back due, in part, to the burden of having a maintenance facility sited so close to where redevelopment is occurring.

“The draft MOU represents a fair deal,” Wallace said in a Monday media release. “The City is left in the black financially, and we were able to negotiate important wins with Sound Transit for the protection of Bellevue’s neighborhoods and businesses from the impacts of the train.”

Balducci said the new MOU, which the Sound Transit board will consider approving on April 23, removes $60 million from the city’s contribution to contingency costs in 2023, following the completion of the $100-million downtown tunnel that starts near the East Main station and ends at the Bellevue Transit Center station at city hall. The Bellevue City Council will hold a public hearing on the MOU on Monday, April 13.

“When we get this (MOU) done, this will be the one that set the groundwork, truly, for construction to begin,” Balducci said.

Constantine said the city and Sound Transit were able to identify cost savings by  revising design options, removing inefficiencies and coordinating road and maintenance projects of mutual benefit to bringing East Link online.

According to a news release, Sound Transit also will pay the city of Bellevue $25 million for permitting and property acquisition interests. The city will gain interest in Sound Transit’s property around the 130th station — this will likely be for mixed-rate housing units — and Sound Transit will have additional use of the city hall property.

Should Sound Transit continue with its preferred alternative of placing a maintenance facility at the old International Paper site in Bel-Red, the MOU calls for designing the project to also provide 1.6 million square feet of retail, office and housing.

“We’re going to shrink it and squish it,” Balducci said, with transit-oriented development planned on the eastern edge of the property. She added it does not call for development on top of the maintenance facility.

If the maintenance facility is sited in Bel-Red, the MOU also calls for the construction of a trail within a one-mile stretch of the Eastside Rail Corridor to connect to a station at 120th Avenue Northeast.

The East Link alignment will not change under the amended MOU and other agreements the city and Sound Transit are set to approve later this month.