Editorial: State, local leaders chew on budget, policy needs

By The Herald Editorial Board

Alicia Crank wants to get the conversations started. A lot of them.

The Edmonds resident, with a professional consulting background with businesses, agencies and governments, formerly was executive director of Seattle City Club, leading such efforts there. But she’s now turning her attention to her home county and elsewhere in the region with a new effort, the Northwest Washington Civic Circle.

The newly launched nonprofit intends to focus on civic engagement and civil discourse programs and events in Snohomish, Island, Kitsap, Skagit and Whatcom counties, and launched those efforts Wednesday with a discussion among local government officials and state lawmakers at Everett’s Edward D. Hansen Conference Center.

“As someone who has worked in this space for a good 10 years now, I recognize that it’s kind of a civic engagement desert up here when we’re not talking politics,” Crank said in opening the discussion. “But there’s so many great organizations, large and small, they’re just kind of siloed. So the hope is that the Northwest WA Civic Circle, we can partner and do programming like this to pool our resources, share our ideas and have a greater reach.”

Drawing from throughout the county, the discussion included Stanwood Mayor Sid Roberts, Mountlake Terrace City Council members Dr. Steve Woodard and Erin Murray, Edmonds City Council members Neil Tibbott and Susan Paine and state Reps. April Berg, D-Mill Creek, and Shelly Kloba, D-Kenmore. The forum was co-moderated by Crank and Herald Opinion page editor Jon Bauer.

While discussions among local government representatives and state lawmakers are frequent over budgets and policies, those conversations rarely occur in front of constituents. With the legislative session, which begins Monday, expected to address significant concerns for municipal and county governments, much of the conversation turned on issues of revenue and delivery of services.

Two topics of discussion covered the property tax that city and county governments depend upon for much of their revenue; and a pending decision from the state Supreme Court that could increase costs for state and local governments in providing public defenders in criminal cases handled by municipal, district and superior courts.

Paine, with professional experience in assisting local governments and agencies, has had numerous conversations with prosecutors, defenders, court staff and judges, regarding case-loads and other issues. Local governments have raised concerns that a change to lighten the caseloads of public defenders is likely to increase costs for those governments.

A further complication in providing more public defenders, Paine noted, is the issue of supply as well as demand.

“There aren’t enough lawyers out there in the world,” she said, even if a new caseload level is set that would require additional hiring. Beyond attorneys themselves, she said, there’s a need for more support in investigating cases and preparing to defend clients.

“It’s going to be really important to have really good prosecutors, really good public defenders, so you have basic equality and get the best outcomes for that case,” she said.

A pending opinion from the state Supreme Court may force the issue, requiring local governments and the state to more equitably fund prosecution, defense and the courts.

The discussion of the property tax that cities and counties are permitted — capped at 1 percent each year — focused on a proposal to lift that limit, with many of the city representatives looking for a change.

Edmonds, Tibbott said, is very dependent on property taxes for its revenue. The 1 percent cap, which was forced down from a 6 percent limit in 2001, resulted in an increasing number of annual structural deficits for local governments, especially so when inflation is running above the target of 2 percent, as it had in recent years

“With periods of incredible inflation like we’re having now, it really is difficult to balance,” he said, with reduced revenue but increases in the costs of the goods, services and labor that cities and the county must budget for.

Tibbott supports an increase of the tax, and thinks local governments can be trusted to seek reasonable revenue from their share of property tax.

“Even if the state gave us back 6 percent, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be raising taxes by 6 percent,” he said.

There’s also concern that some of the messaging about such a tax increase can get muddled in the debate. The Association of Washington Cities advocated last year for an increase that would follow the current inflation rate, but would have been capped at 3 percent, an increase it said would have meant an additional $20 per year for the average homeowner in the state. Yet, some opposition to the legislation misstated the increase as being much larger.

Woodard reiterated the need for that revenue.

“We’re really just looking for tools,” he said. “We need tools to be able to effectively manage the city, whichever city we’re talking about.”

Murray also called for a larger statewide focus on the need for tax reforms, especially those that could address the regressive nature of the current package of taxes in the state that require lower-income families to pay a greater share of their income as taxes than higher income individuals.

Both Berg, chair of the House finance committee, and Kloba acknowledged the financial pressures on local governments, in particular in meeting the needs of shared constituents.

Much of what is spent in taxes, Berg said, for the state goes for K-12 education and for cities and counties funds public safety. For cities and counties, who have now gone through more than 20 years of belt-tightening cuts, further cuts could now weigh on public safety spending.

“If you’re telling me that we can’t raise taxes, you’re telling me you don’t want your police officers to have a living wage in your city,” she said. “And to everyone’s point on this panel, you need the tools. … If we go backwards and we don’t start paying for what we need to pay for, we’re in trouble.”

Kloba agreed that there’s a problem with revenue but also tax fairness, echoing Berg’s support for a tax on the unrealized wealth of investments and securities for about 4,000 of the state’s wealthiest residents. (Gov. Jay Inslee included such a proposal in his budget; but governor-elect Bob Ferguson is not supporting that proposal.)

“When you ask someone, they’re like, ‘Yeah, I pay too much in taxes.’ And they’re right, because the folks that fall below the income spectrum pay a lot more in our state and local taxes than those at the top, and so we need to correct that shift, that imbalance,” Kloba said.

The discussion scratched the surface on these and other issues, but also showed the need for more such exchanges and more involvement from the public.

“I think we have to get all on the same team, and one of the ways that we’re doing that is county and city, where we all come together and try to talk about what we’re doing as a collective elective body,” Roberts said. “We really have to work together and talk about what the real issues are.”

Murray agreed.

“I would really love to see a conversation in terms of when we put all of the work that we do together collectively, the city level, the county level, the water district, the schools, the state. What are our holistic priorities?” she said.

Much of the coming 105-day legislative session will address and work to resolve these and other issues. Wednesday’s forum got the conversation started publicly.

“That’s what we want Civic Circle to be,” Crank said. ‘This place that brings all of that together and says, hey, here’s a reason to come and see what other areas are doing and how you can participate.”