Mayor Wants to Double Down on Seattle Transit Sales Tax

[00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics. I'm David Hyde with Erica C. Barnett. And Erica, we've had a number of people writing in, including someone about our recent episode with Daryl Fairweather from Redfin. William writes, such a great episode, would love more stuff like this, a political perspective around experts. And I couldn't tell, is he saying he wants to hear more from people who actually know what they're talking about?

[00:00:37] I mean, it sounds like damning us with faint praise, if you ask me. William. Maybe Daryl should start her own damn podcast then. She has one. She has one. Okay. Check it out on YouTube. I think he meant it in a positive way, Sandeep Kaushik, political consultant. I'm teasing our friend. Who was it? Who was it that wrote that in? What was the name of the person who wrote it in? William. And full name and email address for our listeners?

[00:01:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. William, sorry. I didn't mean to call you an asshole. All right. So today's show is going to be short. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's proposed doubling a sales tax that funds transit service in Seattle. Controversial in the minds of some, probably not most. Erica C. Barnett, what's being proposed?

[00:01:33] Well, as you said, it's doubling the amount of sales tax that we already pay under a plan called the, it's originally called the Seattle Transit Benefit District. Now it's the Seattle Transit Measure. And we've been passing this thing since 2014. And every time it's gone up a little bit, this would raise it from 0.15% of sales tax to 0.3%. I believe the increase would be about $29 for the typical Seattle resident.

[00:02:01] But, you know, it's controversial among, I would say, transit foes who are asking why we're funding transit when some buses don't have super high ridership right now, post-pandemic still. And it is controversial among some progressives because it is another increase in the regressive sales tax. And, you know, I mean, if you've bought anything in Seattle recently, I mean, you know our sales tax is already astronomical.

[00:02:30] And this would bring it to, I think, an effective tax rate of around 10.7 cents per dollar. So, yeah, I mean, our sales tax is high. It's sort of death by a thousand cuts with regressive taxes. Exactly. Each one isn't very much, but the net effect is tough for folks. But, I mean, this is for transit, for God's sakes. Sandeep, what do you think?

[00:02:54] Well, the last version of this measure, I did the campaign on it in 2020, if I remember correctly. And it passed with 80% of the vote, right? And so, I mean, which is pretty much, you know, as high as these measures go. So, obviously, overwhelming support for it. Previously, I think there will be overwhelming support for this, even though it is a doubling of the rate. But it's not a large levy or measure as these things go.

[00:03:24] As Erica said, it's only a $29 increase over the current, I guess, $29 that people are paying a year. So, yeah, it is sales tax. It is an increase. But I think it's going to be popular. I think it's going to pass. I think the council will not mess with it particularly. And I think it will go to the voters and pass overwhelmingly. I feel like if you're a high-income person who doesn't care about the sales tax, but you're complaining about it and you don't even ride the bus.

[00:03:54] You know, I'm just picturing some folks out there that are complaining, like, that are in that situation. But there could be others. The argument for, you know, I know that there are lefties who sort of are like, you're raising the sales tax. I think the argument that Seattle politicians make for it is, one, it's the taxing authority that they have. But two, that, you know, this is transit service that is largely, you know, much of it is going to be utilized more intensively by lower-income people. And so there's obviously benefits.

[00:04:21] The benefits of what's getting funded here, I think the argument is justify the increase of a regressive tax. Yeah, Erica, it's all about affordability, right? That's what Mayor Wilson says. I mean, she brought up the point during her announcement and then at a City Club event last night as we're recording this. This was on Wednesday night. I'm sure she'll bring it up, you know, on the campaign trail. It's very expensive to own a car.

[00:04:51] A lot of people can't really afford to own a car. Or if they do, you know, it costs around $12,000 a year, she said, for just maintaining and, you know, affording a car that you've already bought. And, of course, that is going up as gas prices go up above $7 a gallon in some places. So, you know, there is a real affordability argument for using transit and for making it easier for people to utilize transit. And I think that that is going to be the argument on the campaign trail.

[00:05:19] You know, I mean, I expect that this will pass. As Sandeep said, you know, this is a very popular measure. Measure, it supplements, just in case people are confused at all about the fact that Seattle doesn't actually provide transit. King County Metro does. Basically, we're buying extra bus hours from King County Metro with this money. You know, and I think the bet is that transit ridership is going to improve, you know, over time.

[00:05:44] And especially as, you know, we add more hours and transit actually gets a little more reliable than it has been since the pandemic. This means we might get there faster? Back to higher ridership? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's the thought. I mean, if you think about it, you know, if you have a bus that comes every 30 minutes and sometimes it doesn't come because there's not a driver, you're less likely to use that bus if you have a car as an alternative. And so, I mean, I don't think they're going to be supplementing that kind of route that much.

[00:06:12] But if it's, you know, a route that's supposed to come every 20 minutes, maybe it can come every 15. Maybe there'll be fewer, you know, gaps like we see now. And so, it'll make it a safer bet to take the bus to get where you want to be on time. What about the $24 million or $23.4 million to help sustain two streetcars? Do we really need to spend $24 million sustaining two streetcars? Should we be getting rid of the streetcars? Any controversy there?

[00:06:40] Well, I mean, I think that we've been subsidizing the streetcars in South Lake Union and the one that goes out to Capitol Hill for a very, very long time. Ridership in South Lake Union is okay. Ridership between Pioneer Square and Capitol Hill is not great. And so, this is kind of keeping those two streetcars, I would say, limping along.

[00:07:02] I'm not a huge fan of having lots and lots of different modes of transit when we have, you know, in a lot of ways, like our rapid ride system works much better than the streetcars to actually transport a lot of people to job centers fast. And rapid ride being the, you know, bus rapid transit service with ideally dedicated lanes. So, I mean, I'll say I'm not the world's biggest streetcar fan. I don't know that, you know, that it is the, it was the wisest investment in the first place.

[00:07:32] But on the other hand, I mean, in the scheme of things, that is not, you know, a huge amount of money compared to what we pay for other types of transit, like sound transit, which we were talking about last week. So, you know, we've got the streetcars. I guess it's better to keep them running than to just let them shut down. People use them. But, yeah, I mean, would I rather see bus rapid transit or more money going into, you know, actual like fixed rail that, you know, is more than a trolley? Absolutely.

[00:08:01] So, yeah, just on the streetcar thing. Look, I don't think there's a controversy sort of surrounding this measure. Again, like I said, the last one passed with 80%. This one's going to pass overwhelmingly too. But there's been the controversy around the streetcar stuff that's been simmering for a long time now in Seattle is that, as Erica says, we have these two lines, these two streetcar lines that are disconnected.

[00:08:22] And there was supposed to be – there have been long, long time kind of back burner plans to connect the two lines with a First Avenue streetcar line, right? And that was originally when Jenny Durkan became mayor in 2017. There was a big question about are we going to fund and finish this sort of connector line, which proponents of it argued would then increase ridership on the streetcar network overall if you connect these two disconnected lines.

[00:08:50] I'm not 100 percent sure that's true, but basically what's happened is that it's just been determined that it costs too much to build this connector line. So it's been left on the back burner for years and years and is, I don't know, probably more or less dead at this point. So anyway, we're keeping these two other lines going, but we're not kind of finishing the system.

[00:09:12] Yeah, I mean the other issue that came up in a press conference where Mayor Wilson announced this was, you know, the city does have the authority to pass a vehicle license fee of up to $60. There's a legal battle over that and we're now here with this authority. So why not add at least some of that license fee and reduce the amount of sales tax because the license fee is, you know, a little it's it's less regressive, right?

[00:09:42] Because you pay more the more expensive your car is. And so why not do that? Mayor Wilson said that she thinks it might be too controversial for voters. There is a measure that failed a metro countywide measure that failed that would have had a vehicle license fee a few years ago. And I think that's kind of like a hot potato now. But, you know, I would say I think that there's a good chance it would pass, you know, in Seattle only.

[00:10:11] And I'm not sure that the mayor is calculating correctly that voters wouldn't be OK with, you know, let's say a $20, $40, even $60 license fee to pay for transit. So I think she's she's kind of being risk averse there. And I understand why transit is really important. It's a huge part of her agenda. But, you know, I mean, we're going to see a lot more taxes, I think, coming out of this mayor just to pay for basic budget stuff in the future.

[00:10:37] And so starting off with kind of a capitulation and saying we have to increase this incredibly regressive tax is, you know, a little I don't know. I don't know if it's a miscalculation, but I think it is a risk averse calculation. And it's worth pointing out that this follows all the bad news for Seattle about Sound Transit. Is it I'll just read this email we got from a listener to our responding to one of our Sound Transit episodes. Joel writes, feels like we're all acting like the steamrolled security guard in Austin Powers.

[00:11:06] I don't really remember that scene. But anyway, what can we do? Could we recall ST3? Could we kill it to restart even if that is painful? I think the answer is no, but maybe it's possible to put some pressure on the mayor and the King County executive to figure out how to in some way get light rail to Ballard, you know, within this century. It was sort of the way we ended up concluding that episode. Let's shift gears now, Sandeep. I know you were dying to talk about something called hop legislation.

[00:11:36] I'm not really sure what it I haven't thought. I haven't been tracking this one. Yeah, it's the it was this was a package of legislation that was introduced in the late days of the Herald administration. It's called the housing opportunities package, hence hop. And it's a set of zoning changes.

[00:11:53] It's like a package, a kind of grab bag of stuff, but a bunch of zoning changes as well as other rules changes that are intended together to incentivize and make it easier to do housing construction and make it more affordable. It eliminates some development barriers.

[00:12:13] It promotes things like, you know, mass timber construction and some other and in some targeted areas allows for more housing capacity to be built. So it's actually, you know, a fairly meaningful set of of changes that are going to, you know, hopefully spur greater housing construction in Seattle. And I think it's important to note that it passed nine nothing at the council with very little fanfare.

[00:12:42] It was legislation, as I said, introduced by the Herald people. But as far as I understand, Katie Wilson, the new mayor, strongly supportive of it. And I think it's indicative of a change in attitudes about or a broadly felt now perception that we really need to do more to jumpstart housing construction in the city.

[00:13:02] And I do think it tees up the much bigger conversation we're presumably about to have about whether we're going to do the mandatory housing affordability holiday that we covered in a in a in a recent episode of Seattle Nice. That is next up. And I know there are backroom conversations on that happening right now.

[00:13:23] But if that comes forward, I think this is a good harbinger that there would be support for that kind of MHA holiday, which is also that intended to to kind of jumpstart the private sector and start housing private sector housing construction to start happening again in the city, which right now that that mandatory housing fee is an impediment to. Yeah, I think this is also happening. I mean, you know, when things pass unanimously, it generally means they're not too controversial.

[00:13:51] I think what's going to be controversial is a comprehensive plan. And and, you know, which is we've talked about it before. It's kind of the the overarching plan that guides zoning and density in the city. And an appeal has been allowed to go forward on that plan, basically saying, you know, arguing that it hurts orcas and birds and that there needs to be additional environmental analysis of the plan on that level.

[00:14:16] And I just want to point folks to, you know, an article, but also just a phrase that the urbanists use that I thought was really astute this week about this appeal, which is that, you know, a certain faction of environmentalists believe in micromanaging development at the project level in order to protect the environment.

[00:14:35] While, you know, the urbanist faction of environmentalists argue that it's more important to prevent sprawl and actual deforestation in forests than to do this kind of micromanagement of like, you know, how many feet of a setback you have to have and how many, you know, tree preservation rules and all the stuff that we've talked about before. So that's going to be a big battle both in the courts and I think in the city council. I just wanted to end on a couple more questions or comments from listeners.

[00:15:04] This one from someone called Brandy, I think in response to something Erica has said, saying she would like to hear more raspberry. It doesn't say Brandy Cruz, but it's this person says they would like to hear more raspberry sounds on the show. Wait, did I actually make, did I actually make a sound or did I sort of vocalize it? I think you said something like I'm tempted to make one or I should make one and you didn't show this.

[00:15:26] This person wants to hear more than another longtime listener and first time emailer Federico writes that he agrees with Erica that there are lots of real world constraints you can't solve with AI, but points us to some website that helps architects deal with bottlenecks. And then along those lines, Erica, you'll love the fact and I'm sure you're getting these too. We get tons of AI pitches now for guests to come on the show. So I'm going to read one of my favorites.

[00:15:54] This one loved how Seattle nice takes messy civil rights fights head on. Oh, sorry. Civic fights head on, especially an episode from last month on KCRH is audit and shelter amendments. It made me wonder, would you ever want to unpack how indoor air quality, mold and other pathogens could collide with housing policy and shelter standards in Seattle? It goes on to pitch her client who founded a company that sells mold home testing kits. So, I mean, AI is doing an amazing job.

[00:16:23] I think we can all agree replacing traditional flags. Oh, my God. I feel like I'm always like when I send emails, I never know if I'm talking to an AI anymore. And, you know, it really makes me question the level of effort that I put into emails because I really do think about them. And that's why it takes me so long to respond to everyone who contacts me. This last one, it's kind of a dig. But David writes, not me, David, somebody else writes,

[00:16:47] I'm quite, quite sure that a large majority of people in Seattle don't know or care who Westneet is. Whatever you think about Westneet, I think that's got to be wrong. No, yeah, that's wrong. Would that it were so. But I mean, but no one gets name dropped more in city council meetings than Danny Westneet. So the people with influence listen to him. And our listeners probably listen to him. Anyway, read him. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice.

[00:17:16] I'm David Hyde. She's Erica C. Barnett. He's Sandeep Kaushik. And thanks, everybody, so much for listening.