Eyman initiative is starving rural Washington [View all]

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Down the road from city hall in the eastern Washington town of Lind, construction of a wastewater treatment plant is well under way. The $3.2 million project is a buoy for the town of just over 500 people — with its progress comes a nice yearly tax windfall for the home of the famous combine demolition derby.

It’s a good thing, too. Lind, built among the subtle hills in the center of wheat country, is in a precarious place when it comes to revenue. There is sales tax and, according to Lind’s mayor Jamie Schmunk, “bits and pieces of real estate excise tax.” But the once dependable property tax has been capped for the last ten years at 1 percent growth. As expenditures climb from year to year, keeping up with them, says Shmunk, can be a challenge.

When Tim Eyman ran the property tax cap as an initiative in 2001, only King and Whitman Counties voted against. The state Supreme Court overturned the initiative in 2007, arguing the voters knew not what they’d done. But the state legislature quickly put it back into place. King County, often seen as the ruler of the statewide ballot, had lost the battle.

To this day, hardly a press conference will pass by without King County Executive Dow Constantine or Seattle Mayor Ed Murray bemoaning the fact that, even as real estate prices skyrocket, the cap restricts the region’s investments. Constantine in his most recent budget speech spoke at great length of the binds it put on the county’s ability to invest in public safety. The King County Sheriff’s Office would lose its helicopter, said Constantine by way of example.

But while King County may have been alone in early opposition to the cap, it does not have a monopoly on ire toward Eyman’s initiative. In fact, as King County benefits from explosive growth (tax on new construction is not capped), it is the small towns and counties across Washington that are perhaps struggling the most under the cap.

http://crosscut.com/2016/12/eyman-property-tax-cap-rural-washington-deficits-budget/