Do you like the bus? Do you like it when the bus comes on time? We do too. That’s why we’re voting a big fat YES on City of Seattle Proposition 1. This funds Seattle’s Transit Benefit District (STBD), which funds bus service in the city (and 8% of King County Metro routes!), free ORCA cards for high school students, and low-income ORCA card programs. This year’s STBD will also fund transportation options on our new favorite island, West Seattle, since they’re dealing with that whole bridge thing (sorry, West Seattle). The funding is vital. And, thanks to the pandemic and to unsuccessful chair liberator Tim Eyman’s car tab tax cap, the STBD is going to be a whole lot smaller in 2020 than the last version we passed in 2014.
What you’re voting on is a 0.15% sales tax—a small increase to the existing 0.1% tax that expires this year—in order to preserve those pro-transit programs and buses that come every 15 minutes around the city. It’ll raise $42 million a year. This could have been a 0.2% tax but city officials didn’t want to impose a bigger regressive tax on people in the wake of an economic recession. Unfortunately, sales tax is pretty much the only way we can fund transit right now. We just *clenches fist* l o v e our state’s regressive tax system and the hoops it makes us jump through to fund things that matter!!!!!
