King County Councilmembers Rod Dembowski and Sarah Perry have put forward a proposal to increase county’s sales tax rate by 0.1% in order to fund transportation improvements and blunt the impact of looming budget cuts at county departments. The tax increase, which is expected to generate around $95 million per year, would be split equally, with half going to King County Metro and half going to the county’s Road Services Department.
Enacted through the county’s Transportation Benefit District (TBD), a 0.1% sales tax bump doesn’t require voter approval and could go into effect by January 1, 2026. It would remain in effect for 10 years. The tax would stack on top of local sales taxes that have also been put in place as part of city TBDs. In Seattle, a 0.15% sales tax approved by voters in 2020 as the Seattle Transit Measure is set to expire in early 2027.
The proposed uses for the funding are fairly broad, and are being framed both at Metro and Roads as geared toward maintaining safety. When it comes to the county’s unincorporated road network, systemic disinvestment over the past few decades has left county government with an inability to perform basic maintenance. The County says the current funding trajectory would lead to a full abandonment of the Road Services Department’s capital program by 2029.
On the Metro side, the amount of funding eyed here isn’t anywhere near enough to stem the tide of its looming fiscal cliff — set to require action by the 2028-2029 biennium — but could be a piece of the future funding puzzle facing Washington’s largest transit agency. Considerable momentum appears to be building behind the idea of using any new revenue to implement recommendations of Metro’s Regional Transit Safety Task Force, a group set up in the wake of the murder of Metro operator Shawn Yim late last year.
If approved, a 0.1% TBD sales tax is unlikely to be the only time that the County Council considers a sales tax increase this year, since the County us now able to enact 0.1% sales tax to fund criminal justice following the state legislature’s approval of House Bill 2015. Several councilmembers, including Dembowski, have urged Interim County Executive Shannon Braddock to swiftly draft legislation allowing the council to act on that new authority, which could be used for law enforcement salaries as well as behavioral health and gun violence prevention initiatives.
Initially put on a fast track to a July vote, the proposal doesn’t face a hard deadline until mid-October, and some councilmembers are already pushing for more time to make a decision.
King County Road Services department’s capital program on the verge of “collapse”
King County’s Road Services Department, largely funded through property tax collections in unincorporated areas, is tasked with maintaining around 1,500 miles of county roads and 188 bridges. While the majority of these roadways are located on the far east side of the county, the Roads department also maintains streets in areas like Skyway, White Center, Fairwood, and the entirety of Vashon Island. With a 1% cap on the ability for the county to increase the property tax levy on its incorporated areas, and annexations continuing to decrease that tax base as time goes on, the Roads department has been bearing the brunt of the structural issues facing counties across the state.
An additional $50 million per year would amount to less than a quarter of the department’s annual funding gap, but it would allow the county to avoid some of the most significant issues that would come without taking any action.
“We really are at a point of inflection right now where we’ve been talking about our funding challenges, we’ve made some changes, but now we’re at that point where if we don’t do something different and have a new funding source, we’re going to start making dramatic cuts and reductions in our program,” Tricia Davis, the Road Services Division’s Director, said Monday.
With the full collapse of the department’s capital program by 2029, the county would not be able to respond to emerging needs and urgent fixes. “If something breaks, we can’t fix it. If something slides, we can’t open that up,” Davis said.
With current funding, King County Roads is also unable to make the type of upgrades needed to make the county transportation accessible to all under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). With the department only able to make around $150,000 in investments annually, it would take King County well over 3,000 years to complete the approximately $551 million in upgrades needed.
“This will enable us to not only maintain what we are currently doing within our capital program, but be able to expand that a little bit — not a lot,” Leon Richardson, Director of the County’s Department of Local Services, said. “The Roads fund has been shrinking over the years, so we’ve continuously had to make tough decisions on what going to do over the past decade, and so this funding would not only allow us to keep doing some of the things, but then select some of the things we’ve been neglecting over the past few years and be able to start doing those things.”
Metro investments focused on safety
As laid out in draft legislation first discussed on Monday, potential uses for these funds at King County Metro are incredibly broad, but would include a specific focus on “safety and security enhancements for bus operators and riders.” By September, the Regional Transit Safety Taskforce is set to release a final report recommending investments that the County should be making to better protect riders and bus drivers.
“Our union is fully in support of adding this councilmanic sales tax proposal. It’s desperately needed, we have a lot of federal funding hanging over our head, we all know how much money we need for roads but we need money for transit too,” Greg Woodfill, President of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587, said in public testimony. “Rather than put it into expanding service or more capital service, how can we expand service if the passengers and the people who operate don’t feel like it’s safe now?”
While the idea of adding new protective barricades to separate the driver’s compartment on coaches has come to the fore as a safety investment at Metro, an initial presentation on the work of the taskforce revealed a broad array of changes that could move the needle on safety. At the top of the list, task force facilitator Ashley Street said, was the need for a regional coordination on incident responses. Here the barriers are less funding than simply getting local governments on the same page.
“If we could say that one had the highest priority, it would be this one,” Street said. “There’s a lot of overlapping jurisdiction — that leads to delays, and people are not sure on who should respond to what and where. And so when we look at the gaps on delay in response, it’s because of this [reason]. We need to make sure that we have [a] standardized definition of what our responses across the jurisdictions. We need to make sure that we have formal agreements outlining the responsibilities and enforcing that jurisdictional coordination that needs to happen, and making sure that we have updated protocols for frontline staff to be able to appropriately address these incidents in real time.”
The TBD funding could also be used for Metro service, but the amount will pale in comparison to the anticipated need, as Metro heads toward a significant funding shortfall that will start to impact the agency well before the end of the decade. While these projections do include planned increases in service levels, it doesn’t reflect the entirety of Metro’s long-range plan, Metro Connects, which remains unfunded.
The biggest factor impacting Metro’s fiscal cliff, apart from stagnant revenue sources and likely federal funding cuts, is the agency’s focus on capital investments intended to meet a 2035 deadline to fully electrify the revenue fleet. While the massive investments needed to convert existing infrastructure to electric are creating intense pressure on the county budget, former Executive Dow Constantine nonetheless continued to defend them up until the point he left his post to become Sound Transit’s new CEO. But a report expected later this year is set to throw clarity on the issue of trading electrification investments for service.
With the 0.1% sales tax enacted by council vote, that would still leave an additional 0.2% available if the council decided to go to the voters for additional transportation funding. The last time that was considered was in 2020, when the TBD met to discuss a potential countywide transit funding ballot measure but decided not to move forward after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The TBD can also approve $50 in vehicle license fees over a period of years via a councilmanic vote or up to $100 with voter approval.
Ultimately, the sales tax proposal is a direct response to the funding challenges only set to increase at the county level, as the council faces a $150 million deficit in the general fund next year. With the legislature declining to approve the county’s biggest request — lifting the 1% annual property tax cap — the other immediate revenue options are limited and, on the whole, regressive. While the 0.1% sales tax is likely to move forward, there looks to be increased scrutiny over the coming weeks on just what the funds are set to be used on.
“I’m going to need to see what are the options and the tradeoffs here,” TBD board chair Claudia Balducci said. “I’m not signalling that I couldn’t get here… It is a difficult year to be asked for another sales tax increase unless I can really point to, and say, if we don’t do this now, here’s the downside, here’s what happens. I need the case to be made very specifically.”
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.