By Beth Jarvis / Herald Forum
Did you recently receive a postcard from the Port of Everett? Did you see the word tax anywhere on it?
The Port of Everett wants to enlarge its present small boundary to include almost all Snohomish County cities, growing in size and revenue more than seven times. This Aug. 6 vacation-month ballot measure has not been well publicized.
And the public statements for port expansion seem to be dazzling voters with promises of: jobs, recreation, environmental enhancements, transportation improvements, economic development, and access to grants. What’s not immediately clear is that the port is a taxing district, and once installed, the Port will tax all of us forever.
Great efforts have gone into marketing all the benefits of the port and how it has unique tools and authorities that a city, county or other jurisdiction does not have. This fact alone should concern voters. This means your individual voice in city or county government will be diminished under another powerful layer of government with its own agenda.
During wartime, we could understand the need for this kind of power, but today this just seems like bureaucratic overreach. The port does not need to help all cities in Snohomish County determine or accomplish their project lists. This has been, and still is, the job of our own city and county government.
Whether three or five commissioners, individual taxpayers are going to go through a lot more hurdles to have a say over priorities and the use of taxes. And we’re being told the port is an engine to guide and speed up development. What happens when we don’t want that development? Could development be an Amazon facility or an expanded airport placed in the middle of the Snohomish Valley?
Recently, a Snohomish city councilwoman and chair of the fundraising committee for the Port’s Proposition 1 ballot measure suggested that the Port could facilitate projects like: shop site cleanup, public works, new parks, a paddleboat/wedding venue, or another boutique hotel. Unfortunately, this suggestion failed to realize the difference between the public and private sector. Will port involvement be instigating unwanted and uninvited local competition and cause friction within city and county government and the private business community?
What happens when a Port project does not benefit us or our city and spoils our quality of life? In the town of Snohomish, we’re being told by the port’s fundraising committee chair that the port has unique financing tools to develop new public works projects. Right now, the community is waiting for a response from the airport regarding their environmental assessment which was cited by the county, the Marshland Flood Control District commissioners and neighbors as being incomplete and therefore inaccurate.
If the port succeeds, won’t our leverage with our city and the county be diminished? The airport’s plan to relocate Airport Way and move the runway south into Hanson Slough, a floodplain, may well be on their agenda. How will this be reconciled if the port has so much authority?
What taxpayers need to know is that the port has the taxing authority to go from the current 18.8 cents per $1,000 assessed value to a cap of 45 cents per $1,000 of assessed value. That translates into an annual property tax of $450 for a typical middle-class home valued at $1 million. But hold on, the Port can even exceed that 45-cent cap for general bonded indebtedness for big air, land, and sea transportation projects that can go on for decades.
Vote no on the Port of Everett Proposition 1 boundary enlargement and new tax.
Beth Jarvis is a resident of the city of Snohomish.
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