Local governments didn’t ask lawmakers for what they need most: adequate tax levies

Christmas wish lists have come and gone, but the new year brings a different sort of wish list: the ones local governments send to the state legislature.

Our local governments have lots of wishes. Tumwater wants funding to help preserve and improve an historic cemetery; Olympia wants the state to ban the sale of invasive English and Atlantic ivy that are the bane of Priest Point and other parks. Thurston County and Lacey want changes to annexation laws. The county also wants more money to pay for elections, and for removing culverts that block fish passage. And that’s just the stocking stuffer wishes.

A regional legislative agenda — agreed to by the cities, the county, the Port of Olympia, the Chamber of Commerce, South Puget Sound Community College, the Economic Development Council, and the Thurston Regional Planning Council — asks for money to pay for state government-related civil lawsuits that are filed in our Superior Court; money for the next phase of the long-running Environmental Impact Statement to resolve the Capitol Lake versus estuary debate; money for the final phase of new Lacey food bank; and beer money.

Beer money, which is on Tumwater’s wish list too, is funding for equipment and transportation infrastructure to support the brewing and distilling education center that is rising on Capitol Boulevard. This investment promises to become a very important economic asset to our region.

Lacey and Olympia disagree about transportation priorities. Lacey wants the state to keep its focus on I-5 between Mounts Road and Tumwater; Olympia wants action on freeway access ramps to Highway 101 that affect its west side.

Olympia and the county are the only two local governments to express their wish for more action on climate change.

And then, of course, there are the issues of homelessness and affordable housing. These issues are absent from the regional and county wish lists. And homelessness is mentioned in Lacey’s wish list only in passing, in its request for more mental health money.

To be charitable, perhaps this is because it’s already obvious that homelessness will be the marquee issue of this legislative session. But still, not calling out the need for action on housing and homelessness does seem like a failure to represent the concerns of local residents.

Olympia’s focus on homelessness and housing is comprehensive: As the city with the county’s highest percentage of low-income renters and people who are homeless, it asks for everything from mental health and addiction treatment to rent control. Olympia also asks for the use of state property to alleviate homelessness.

Tumwater has a more specific request for state funding for stabilization sites, tiny houses, and supportive housing for people who are already living on state land along freeways and on Deschutes Parkway, which is state property.

We find all of these requests reasonable and supportable. But the elephant in this room is only lightly mentioned in Olympia’s and the county’s lists: the 1 percent property tax cap – one of Tim Eyman’s terrible ideas, first passed as Initiative 747 in 2001. The initiative was found unconstitutional, but a misguided legislature, bowing to misguided voters, passed it into law.

So imagine this: Your boss announces that from now on, you will only receive a 1 percent pay raise each year, regardless of how much inflation rises and the cost of living goes up. This means that, over time, your standard of living will fall almost every year.

This is, in effect, what the 1 percent property tax does to local governments, our libraries, and our Port. Rising property values don’t help, because the cap applies to the total amount the county collects, not to the tax rate.

Over time, this means government must reduce services to citizens, curtail local environmental protection, and skimp on criminal justice and public safety. Their only option is restricted and incremental increases in the most regressive tax of all – the sales tax – which doesn’t begin to fill the ever-deeper hole created by the property tax cap.

But tax-phobic legislators have yet to bow to the logic or summon the courage to do away with this supremely destructive law.

It’s true that local governments can ask voters for exceptions to the property tax cap — as the county will in April to finance a new courthouse. But local governments should be able to keep up with inflation automatically. It’s perplexing that the state recognizes the need for the minimum wage to rise with inflation, but not local government and library budgets.

If we were writing a legislative wish list, doing away with the 1 percent property tax cap would be at the top of it.