In my column this week, I talk to King County Executive candidates Fred Jarrett and Ross Hunter, two Eastside Democrats who serve in the state Senate and House, respectively. (Longer Q&As with each candidate, as well as a report from last night’s executive forum in Renton, will be posted on the Stranger’s web site shortly). In our conversations, both candidates told me that the one percent cap on property taxes (passed by voters as Tim Eyman’s Initiative 747, overturned by the state supreme court, and subsequently reinstated, at Gov. Christine Gregoire’s request, by a special session of the state legislature) was one of the biggest problems facing the county: Because the county relies primarily on property taxes, and because one percent is lower than the rate of inflation, the cap means county government has to make deeper cuts every year.
Hunter: [The county has] a structural revenue problem. They get 60 percent of their revenue from property tax and that only grows one percent a year, and inflation is just bigger than that. Over time, they have to keep doing less and less as a county. And if the county’s doing things that you think are really important to quality of life, like public health or putting miscreants in jail, then that’s bad news.
Jarrett: There are some structural problems around their revenue sources, but there are solutions to those that the county council and executive have decided not to take. While they are limited to 1 percent property tax growth [each year], they’re able to go out and ask the voters if the voters will want those services. They haven’t done that because they know they’ll lose. They haven’t made the case to the voters that those services are important.
However, both men voted to reinstate the one percent cap on property taxes in their roles as state legislators in 2007.
I called Hunter and Jarrett to see why they voted to put the cap back in place, whether they stood by their votes, and whether, in light of massive recent budget cuts at the county, they thought voters were prepared to raise their taxes to protect county services.
Hunter paused for a long time, then he said:
Why’d I vote that way in the first place? I voted that way because that’s what the [House Democratic] caucus decided to do on that issue. … I’m finance chair and to some degree I follow the lead of my caucus. … I don’t think it works, but I think it’s what the people want. One of the things I tried to do this year was make corrections to the county’s tax structure. And what I found is that there is immense resistance to doing that within the caucus. I was surprised by that, because we’re looking at some pretty devastating cuts at the county… The members are concerned, but they also have concern that the county has a spending problem. … I don’t thing King County is going to be able to get its voters or the legislature to vote for more revenue authority until they convince both the voters and the legislators that they’re spending what they have in a reasonable way. … I think you’ve got to come back and convince the voters that you have a real issue and they actually want the services you provide. … Until people can understand what the county spends its money on, I don’t think they do they aren’t going to vote to raise their taxes. … Is one percent the right number? No, it’s not. We should probably use a number that’s closer to some measure of inflation. Every year they do less. Maybe that’s what you want, but it’s not what I want.
Jarrett , similarly, said the county hasn’t made the case that it deserves more tax revenue:
One of the county’s big problems is that it hasn’t built the public support for the programs, and that’s why you have things like the one percent cap. My view is generally, I don’t want to overturn decisions that the public made. I dislike the way that Tim approaches politics and the way that he tries to make public policy without understanding what the consequences of it are, but by the same token, one of the things that I have learned over the years is that when people don’t get to have the consequences of a vote they don’t learn that they have to be a little bit more careful when they’re doing their analysis of a vote. … Notice that what i said last night is not that you do away with the property tax cap. I said, you work with the law as it is. You can go above one percent—you just have to have a vote of the people. The county has not been able to demonstrate the need to the people to do that. … If you look at the rhetoric that comes out of Eyman and his ilk, what they talk about is how much property taxes are rising. Well, the reason they’re going up is voter-approved levies. … When it’s a specific thing and people see value in it, they’re willing to vote for taxes.
But is it always possible to build public support for all the necessarily arcane programs of unmeasured and unmeasurable value? The tendency is not to trust what can’t be explained in plain enough english—i.e., most of what any highly complex institution, public or private, engages in on a routine basis.
For public entities, this leaves the nay-sayers in charge as they can frame their criticisms in what ever language captures the public’s imagination, without need of paying heed to the actual operation and functionality of the organization itself.
Jarret is right. You have to let people see first hand what happens when programs are cut.
“I voted for these policies, which I knew were bad ones, because Frank Chopp and Christine Gregoire told me to.” Makings a fine county executive right there.
Translation for the uninformed: “I voted that way cause I got more campaign bucks by screwing people over.”
Ross Hunter is mostly a pretty good legislator, but he yelled at me at a picnic once, so I had to go into the comments here to see if there was appropriate vitriol being heaped on his head. But no, dammit, there isn’t, so my schadenfreude quotient is unmet as yet.
Actually, Geni, they all did pretty well at last night’s event.
I was kind of surprised by that, I figured Dow would knock it out of the park (he’s better at speeches) and Larry would do very well and then the other two would be left in the dust.
But they all did pretty well, considering.
Citizens’ tax/spending cap initiatives are bullshit. Just ask our good blue state friends in California.
Neither of these guys seems to have the slightest concept of what being a “representative” in a “representative government” means. They appear gutless and unwilling to do the job they got elected to do. Plus ça change…
good to hear what their views are, or at least, their views today…
it’d be interesting to take a look and see how many times (if any) hunter voted against his caucus since that 1% tax vote to confirm that he generally does what his caucus tells him to.
and as far as jarrett saying that he doesn’t want to overturn the public’s decision, hope he’s got a good explanation for his vote to overturn I-937.
Chiming in to help @ #6 — As one of your good friends in California I can testify that whatever the anti-tax campaigns think up they will deploy to make sure that additional levies (for example, extra money to pay for street lights because the electricity bills have risen 30% in the last four years) do not pass. Prop. 13, the Howard Jarvis property tax cap that passed in 1978, has virtually ruined any chance of getting effective services from any jurisdiction that relies on property taxes to get things done. As a result, California’s education system is ranked 49th in the country, and counties from one end of the state to the other are trying to decide how many libraries to close, how many police officers to lay off, how long they can delay filling in potholes the size of hippopotamuses, and whether they can get a little extra money by maybe super-enforcing parking restrictions that come with tickets and fines. It’s not possible to explain to the majority of voters that revenue has to be permitted to rise at least at the rate of inflation or they will lose vital services — it doesn’t translate into easy slogans, and the anti-tax forces are masters of the easy slogan.
I expect that by the time I retire we’ll be ready to adopt an income tax system in this state. By that time we’ll also (finally) have a commuter rail system between Seattle, Tacoma, Shoreline, Kirkland, Redmond, and Bellevue.
@7 calling Ross Hunter gutless is pretty funny. He is fairly aggressive, going so far as to recognize his impatience as a fault in the interview linked to above. His answer is actually startlingly honest. Essentially he says: I opposed this, the caucus checked me and so I yielded to leadership. That is party discipline and it puts him in a pickle. If he had told the Speaker and the D-caucus to F-off, do you think he would have gotten anything passed? No. If he votes against it, and it loses, does his opposition matter? Maybe not. If he gets the reputation of being unwilling to compromise or consider other views, would anyone in their right mind ever want to work with him? No.
Still, we all want him to stand up for his principles. At least know we have an idea about when and where he picks his battles.