King County Council member Larry Phillips is forming an exploratory
committee for a potential challenge against King County Executive
Ron Sims.
The decision is timely—and a long time coming. Two weeks ago,
Sims announced the county would have to cut $68 million from its
budget in 2009, a crisis Phillips and other critics called both
predictable and utterly avoidable.
The cuts are more than superficial. They slash away at the heart and
soul of county government—policing (Sheriff Sue Rahr predicts she
will have to eliminate more than 100 deputies), public health (the
county’s cash-strapped health clinics may have to close),
and
human services (whose funding
from the county will be slashed over
three years to nothing).
Phillips blames the crisis on a structural shortfall in the county’s
budget. Thanks to Tim Eyman’s 1 percent annual cap on property-tax
increases (overturned in court but reinstated by the state
legislature), the county takes in far less than it spends each year.
Sales and other tax revenues, likewise, have failed to rise as fast as
spending. Meanwhile, parts of the county that are urbanized but
unincorporated—like White Center—use more resources than
they pay for.
All of this, Phillips says, has been common knowledge around King
County for years. In the early part of the decade, the county cut more
than $135 million from its annual budget. “When you cut that much, you
reach a plateau—and so we had relatively good years in 2006 and
2007,” says Phillips, who chairs the council’s capital budget
committee. “But then, oops, wait a minute—the structural problems
are still there, and off the cliff you go again. Once you
understand that, and [Sims] does, it’s easy to anticipate that this is
a problem that needs to be dealt with.”
Therein lies what will undoubtedly be Phillips’s campaign stump
speech: Sims knew damn good and well the county had a serious financial
problem—but instead of turning to the state legislature for
solutions, he declared victory. “He said to the public and the
press that the era of big deficits was over, and that just wasn’t
true,” Phillips says. If he had been in Sims’s position, Phillips says,
he would have “gone to Olympia and said, ‘We need you to help
us'”—by lifting the property-tax cap, providing the county with
new revenue sources, or implementing some other structural fix.
Statements like that are easy to make in hindsight, of
course—if Hillary Clinton had known then what she knows now,
she wouldn’t have voted for the war. But if Phillips wants to
convince voters to toss out a 12-year incumbent, that
contrast—while Phillips argued for change, Sims declared the
problem solved—will be the strongest weapon in his arsenal.
