New County Transportation Funding Measure Could Shortchange Seattle
The King County Council is on the verge of tapping into a long-dormant funding source with the goal of aiding the county's beleaguered Road Services Division. But an amendment on deck doling out a portion of those new dollars to King County cities could end up significantly shortchanging Seattle, the county's largest city.
The new 0.1% sales tax, administered through a King County Transportation District that was established in 2014, is expected to generate around $100 million per year, the bulk of which will go toward maintenance and preservation work on the county's approximately 1,500 miles of roads through unincorporated areas. But after local elected officials pushed for a cut of the funding, pointing out that the vast majority of sales tax revenue gets generated within cities, the measure is poised to include a pass-through handing over a slice of that revenue to King County's 39 cities.
After a wild April meeting where different pass-through amounts from 12.5% to 25% were thrown about but no proposal garnered enough votes to pass, the Council seems to have settled on the 12.5% amount. Two competing amendments discussed on Thursday put forward by Steffanie Fain and Claudia Balducci both included that amount, but from there the proposals differed sharply.
Fain's amendment included a minimum allocation to every city of $10,000, ensuring that even towns like Beaux Arts Village (pop. 310) and Skykomish (pop. 165) receive a slice of the pie that is meaningful. But it also included a cap that prevents any one city from getting more than 15% of the total amount – a cap that only impacts Seattle. By population, Seattle is approximately 38% of the county's incorporated area, with the second largest city in King County (Bellevue) at around 7%.
https://www.theurbanist.org/new-county-transportation-funding-measure-could-shortchange-seattle/