A jubilant Tim Eyman of Mukilteo scored a major legal victory Oct. 30 when the state Supreme Court upheld Initiative 776, his bid to keep car tabs at $30.
“I feel like a 12-year-old girl who just met Ricky Martin,” Eyman said. “I was screaming so loud that my kids were covering their ears.”
Still, it’s not a complete victory yet.
Sound Transit plans to keep collecting a 0.3 percent motor vehicle excise tax in the urban centers of Snohomish, King and Pierce counties that I-776 sought to eliminate. Eyman believes the state Attorney General’s Office and a private intervener will be successful in eliminating that tax in an upcoming challenge in King County Superior Court.
For now, vehicle tabs will be $30 plus three-tenths of a percent of the vehicle’s value, which means paying an extra $30 for a $10,000 car or another $60 for a $20,000 car.
A piece of I-776 that looks like it will stick is the elimination of a $15 vehicle license fee once collected in Snohomish County and still collected in King and Pierce counties.
The Snohomish County Council voted to stop collecting the $15 fee shortly after voters approved I-776 in late 2002. That vote took away about $6 million a year that was dispersed in the county based on population.
“It’s been missed, but it wasn’t written into our budget,” Snohomish County Executive Bob Drewel said. “There were things that we didn’t get to do because we didn’t have the money.”
The county lost $3.8 million a year that it spent to fix roads in unincorporated communities. The loss of revenue means county planners have seen their six-year transportation plan slashed from about $250 million to about $210 million, a loss magnified because the county had used the money to leverage for matching federal grants.
Lukas Velush is a reporter for The Herald in Everett.
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