Washington state law enforcement agencies say their budgets are at risk

County executives and law enforcement leaders across King, Snohomish and Pierce counties said the state’s law limiting elected officials in raising property tax revenue by a maximum of 1 percent a year, threatens the budgets of public safety agencies.

State law limits property tax revenue growth to 1 percent per year. This is independent of any voter-approved levies.

This means that city and county governments may only set a property tax rate that would bring in a maximum of 1 percent more money than the previous year. On top of that, new construction would then be taxed based on the rate set with existing properties, effectively bringing in more than a 1 percent increase.

With this system, even if new properties are created and property values increase, the tax rate may sometimes be decreased in order to keep the growth rate at 1 percent.

“But the rate of inflation plus population alone is 3.5 percent,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine. “Transit and other county services that have their own dedicated revenues, are ok. The same can’t be said for General Fund services like sheriff’s deputies and prosecutors.”

Constantine told the King County council Monday morning that his proposed budget must include a reduction of staff at the Prosecutor’s Office.

He also said that halfway through the biennium, the county will run out of money for the sheriff’s Air Support and Marine units, while they are already 30 deputies short of what they need.

By 2018, Constantine said the county will be no longer able to book inmates at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in south King County.

“Remember, we’re the home of Starbucks, and Costco, and Boeing and Nordstrom’s and Amazon.com. And we can’t make ends meet,” said Sheriff John Urquhart.

When deciding where he would slash services, Urquhart said he would choose to cut back on King County Air Support and Marine Rescue, rather than cutting back on deputies on patrol.

He said he could maintain the Air Support and Marine Rescue teams for another year, but would then scale back to perhaps no longer send them to assist other jurisdictions, “knowing full well that people were going to die, because we would not be able to rescue them. We wouldn’t be able to go up to Burlington or the next Burlington and look for the bad guy.”

The cap of 1 percent tax revenue growth was introduced about 15 years ago through an initiative pushed by Tim Eyman.

“I don’t know why these local politicians are complaining, because they always have the option to ask the voters for more money at the ballot box,” Eyman said. “They also get sales tax revenues and all sorts of other revenues, so they’re getting plenty of money.”

Eyman referred to the capability for city and county governments to ask for levies to be approved by voters at the ballot box.

King County staff shared budget breakdowns that show 41 percent of the general fund is made up of property tax revenue, while sales tax makes up 17 percent.

The rest is made up of charges for services, fines and fees, federal and state revenue, and intergovernmental receipts.

King County staff also said that a state law prevents counties with more than 1.5 million people to ask voters for levies that would maintain existing services.

That population threshold applies only to King County, out of the state’s 39 counties. This means King County can only ask voters to approve levies for new programs, or for the expansion of existing services, but not to increase funds for services in their current capacity.

Cox Media Group