Tag: King County Council

King County, legislature, Taxes

Could a Sales Tax Hike for Criminal Justice Programs Save the County’s Budget?
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay speaks at a recent press conference on state funding cuts.

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last week, King County Council chair Girmay Zahilay and budget chair Rod Dembowski sent a letter urging acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock to send down legislation imposing a new sales tax of 0.1 percent to boost funding for the county’s criminal legal system, including sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, public defenders, and diversion programs.

State legislators approved a bill giving local jurisdictions the new taxing authority last week; Governor Bob Ferguson hasn’t sign the bill yet, but he expressed support for the proposal earlier in the session, which ended on Sunday.

With the county facing an estimated $160 million shortfall in its general-fund budget over the next two years, Zahilay said the new revenue would be a game-changer. “If we don’t find a solution, we will see deep and painful cuts to services that the community relies on,” like police, prosecutors, and public health clinics, Zahilay said. “It would mean hundreds and hundreds of positions cut out of King County government.”

The new tax could be used on a variety of programs that fall broadly in the “criminal justice” category, explicitly including reentry programs, public defenders, diversion programs, and “Local government programs that have a reasonable relationship to reducing the numbers of people interacting with the criminal justice system including, but not limited to, reducing homelessness or improving behavioral health.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Last week, county budget director Dwight Dively told the council that the areas most at risk for cuts (some of them due to potential state budget cuts that did not materialize) are public health and the Department of Community and Human Services, which funds services for homeless King County residents.

Because DCHS is funded largely by the state’s document recording fee on real-estate transactions, its funding has declined dramatically as the housing market has slowed. When that happens, Dively said, “either we have to immediately cut funding for homelessness services, and we all understand the consequences of that, or we have to find another revenue source to at least temporarily backfill that, and that’s the general fund.

So what does that have to do with a criminal-justice sales tax? According to Zahilay, because the legislation did not include language banning “supplantation”—which would have barred the county from using the tax to free up general-fund dollars for unrelated purposes—the tax could help address that looming $160 million deficit. (The county’s deficit is smaller than the city’s, in part, because more county services are funded with dedicated funding sources, like levies.)

That “means that we could absolutely use these funds to fund our criminal justice efforts and redirect funds that would otherwise go toward those initiatives … to fund other things,” Zahilay said. “Based on the estimates that I’ve seen, this new tax would be enough to fund our entire general fund shortfall.”

The sales tax remains the primary tool local governments have for raising funds without passing a property tax levy; it’s a regressive tax because people with lower incomes pay a larger percentage of their income on sales taxes than people who make more. “I was hoping we’d have more options [from the legislature], beacuse out of all the types of taxes, I believe the sales tax is the most regressive one of all,” Zahilay said. “But I’m definitely grateful that we have an option to save our general fund and critical services.”

King County

Meeting to Consider County Executive Appointment Canceled, Leaving Shannon Braddock In Limbo at Least Two More Weeks
Acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock

By Erica C. Barnett

Shannon Braddock, the acting King County Executive, will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out if the County Council plans to appoint her to the position through November, after Council Chair Girmay Zahilay canceled the council’s scheduled Tuesday meeting. The council appointed Braddock acting executive on April 1.

Zahilay said he made the decision out of respect for Councilmember Sarah Perry, whose husband, state Sen. Bill Ramos, died suddenly during a trail run on Saturday.

“Lots of our colleagues reached out saying they thought it would better for us to not meet on Tuesday, given that our colleague on the council has experienced such a sudden and tragic loss,” Zahilay told PubliCola. Zahilay said council staff told him there was no “time-sensitive legislative action” on the agenda.

In addition to legislation appointing Braddock (and a competing proposal from Reagan Dunn to initiate a process that could potentially end up appointing someone else), the agenda included an item appointing Braddock to the Sound Transit board, which is currently considering the future of light rail extensions to Ballard and West Seattle. The agenda also included a proclamation declaring April Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the introduction of this year’s Medic One Levy proposal.

“I think this is one of those situations where our desire to address the human side of this job come into play,” he said. Rod Dembowski, the head of the council’s budget committee, also canceled a meeting on Tuesday.

Zahilay is one of two county council members who’s running for County Executive.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

The other is Claudia Balducci, who—after consulting with Perry’s office—decided not to cancel tomorrow’s meeting of the council’s Committee of the Whole. The agenda for that meeting includes several briefings about the local impact of federal funding cuts and a letter, sponsored by Balducci, supporting a state proposal to raise the cap on property tax increases—currently set at a sub-inflationary 1 percent—to 3 percent, which would allow local governments to raise more funds.

Balducci called the federal funding cuts a “rapidly developing risk to county government and services. We meet regularly once a month and by next month, the info we are being briefed on may have changed dramatically,” she said, so “it seemed important to me to proceed.”

“There are no scheduled major votes, so Sarah won’t miss an opportunity to vote,” Balducci added.

The council will take up Braddock’s appointment again on May 6, along with a counterproposal from Councilmember Reagan Dunn that would set up a “blue ribbon selection committee” to choose a finalist and an alternate for the position from a list of five people Constantine previously designated as potential successors.

The proposal is a long shot—Zahilay said he thinks Braddock has the votes—but it’s an example of the obstacles facing Braddock, who’s the first woman to ever serve as King County Executive.

“I absolutely understand and support” the decision to delay the meeting out of respect for Perry and her family, Braddock told PubliCola. “I’m eager to serve on the Sound Transit Board and I’m closely tracking the upcoming actions and will be prepared once the appointment occurs.”

City Council, Elections, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Opposes Funding Social Housing; County Councilmember Zahilay Seeks $1 Billion Housing Investment

1. Mayor Bruce Harrell told members of the City Council that he opposes Initiative 137, which would fund social housing by imposing a tax on employers who pay workers more than $1 million a year. Instead, he wrote in a Tuesday email, he supports putting a competing alternative on the ballot that would provide no new funding—for example, an alternative proposed by the Seattle Times editorial board that would force the social housing developer to “compete for Housing Levy dollars.”

The housing levy, funded through a property tax, primarily pays for low-income housing built by nonprofit housing developers; the social housing developer hopes to build mixed-income developments where higher-wage workers’ rent would help subsidize housing for lower-income residents.

“Social housing as a concept may prove to have benefits, but the City has also been advised that Initiative 137 comes with legal risk,” Harrell wrote. “Voters interested in exploring the concept of social housing ought to have an option to do so that allows social housing to be established as a successful proof-of-concept before further increasing taxes.”

In the email, addressed to Council President Sara Nelson, Harrell said he had “spoken to you and members of the City Council individually last week and this week.” But Tammy Morales, the council’s most progressive member and a supporter of social housing, was not among them. In an email to Harrell’s deputy chief of staff, a staffer for Morales said Harrell has consistently “iced out” Morales, despite the fact that she is one of the council’s two longest-serving members.

“The Mayor has never returned a phone call from Councilmember Morales, hasn’t reached out to meet with her (at least not this year, I can’t speak to previous years), consistently does not invite us to events, and does not seem interested in even trying to extend an olive branch to our office,” the staffer wrote. “We have been working hard to pass the Mayor’s legislation through Land Use Committee. The very least he could do is meet with her.”

Morales challenged Harrell, then the District 2 council member, in 2015 and lost; she was elected four years later.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

2. King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay has proposed his own potential funding measure that’s strikingly similar to the social housing proposal, except that it would not require a new development authority or taxing source. Instead, Zahilay’s legislation would ask County Executive Dow Constantine to establish a “regional workforce housing initiative” that would develop a plan to use at least $1 billion of the county’s $9 billion in available debt capacity to build permanently affordable housing at a variety of income levels.

Much like the social housing proposal, Zahilay’s legislation anticipates that higher-income renters would subsidize apartments for their lower-income neighbors through higher rents.

“If we are going to have a functioning society, we need our workers, especially essential workers, to live closer to where they work,” Zahilay said.

Instead of creating a new public developer, like the one voters approved for social housing last year, Zahilay’s plan would rely on existing public developers, like the King County Housing Authority, and nonprofits that already develop and operate housing. He said he doesn’t consider his idea a competitor to social housing, although it would fill a similar niche in the market—permanently rent-restricted housing for people making up to 120 percent of the are median income. The rents would be set “at whatever monthly cost it takes to maintain and operate the buildings and pay down the interest and principal on the debt,” Zahilay said.

Also like social housing, the new housing Zahilay envisions would operate essentially outside the housing market, with rents that would remain “constant, other than to reflect interest rate changes on debt service,” according to the legislation. How all this would work, what kind of rents would be required to make the plan feasible, and how much housing the county could fund with $1 billion are all to be determined: Zahilay said he’s “asking [the executive] to do the analysis and create an implementation plan in a way that pencils. I think there would be some pushback if it was directive.”

King County

County Council Commits to “Maintain Operations” at Youth Jail Until Someone Comes Up with a Better Solution
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Council committed yesterday to keeping the Patricia Clark Children and Family Justice Center open, in a symbolic vote that signals a retreat from previous commitments to close down the youth jail.

The resolution, originally proposed by Republican Councilmember Reagan Dunn, says, “It is the intent of the King County Council to maintain operations of the juvenile secure detention facility at the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center.”

During the summer of 2020, King County Executive Dow Constantine committed to closing down the youth jail, saying the county would move “public dollars away from systems that are rooted in oppression and into those that maintain public health and safety, and help people on a path to success.” Historically, the county has disproportionately jailed Black youth; in 2021, Constantine said closing the youth jail would affirm
King County’s commitment to becoming an anti-racist, pro-equity government.”

As part of this “Care and Closure” effort, an advisory committee recommended six actions the county could take to facilitate the closure of the youth jail, but not all had unanimous support; for instance, a proposal to create a “receiving and respite” center for young people to go immediately after they’re arrested, as an alternative to jail, proved contentious.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

During yesterday’s meeting, Democratic council members emphasized that they were still committed to creating a better kind of youth detention at some point in the future.

Councilmember Girmay Zahilay called this a “yes, and” approach, through which “we can have a building with a secure perimeter, where the internal infrastructure is far more conducive to rehabilitation, mental health, education, job training and more. … This is what our amendment calls for—a commitment to transformation, while acknowledging the persistent need for a serious building that is far more oriented toward rehabilitation.”

A majority of the people who spoke about the jail supported closing it or replacing it with a less punitive facility. The jail supporters included several speakers who suggested that incarcerating young people was the only way to keep children, elderly people, and other law-abiding people safe.

“Unfortunately some kids need to go on to a juvenile detention center because the other things are not working,” said one Maple Valley resident, who said her daughter was attacked by “minorities” because she is white. “Please, keep the facility open,” she said, claiming this was the only way her family could feel safe from “being jumped” by non-white people in their community.

As of today, there are 59 young people, from 12 to 18 years old, incarcerated at the youth jail, with another 48 on electronic home detention; 61 percent of them are Black.

King County, Tech

King County’s Baffling Website Redesign, (Sorta) Explained
From King County’s “Services” web page.

By Erica C. Barnett

After the disastrous launch of a new website that crashed due to traffic from people seeking election results last November, the King County Council passed a budget proviso, or restriction, late last year—holding back $200,000 from the project until the county’s IT department produced a status update “addressing concerns about the King County website upgrade.”

That upgrade, which started in 2017, has cost King County taxpayers $15 million so far (not counting the salaries of county employees), and will be out of date as soon as 2027, when Sitecore—the county’s content management system—changes its technology for web platforms and will no longer support King County’s website. When that happens, the county will have to find a new content management system. (A content management system, or CMS, is the “back end” of a website; PubliCola, a much simpler site than the county’s, uses WordPress).

As we reported last year, the new website design is bare-bones—more than one county employee told us they thought it was an “interim” or “intermediate” step before the “real” website launched—and confusing to navigate.

Many basic government services are hidden somewhere in an alphabetical site index that’s often redundant or counterintuitive—the county assessor’s heavily used property mapping services is buried under the label “GIS services,” in addition to its official name, “Parcel Viewer,” for instance—and the main site features a list of seemingly random county services arranged in no discernible order.

Currently, for example, visitors to kingcounty.gov are greeted with a full screen about dog adoptions, followed by a banner about the March Presidential primary election, followed by highlighted links to King County Metro, rural traffic camera feeds, the pet adoption page (again), and the county’s “careers” site (which requires additional clicks to get to a list of jobs).

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

“It’s not an improvement from what we had before,” County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, told PubliCola. “There have been improvements since [the new site] first went up—we’ve put in some requests for changes—but they’re modest. It’s things like borders and white space, and can we have pictures of the council members on their council member pages.” (Originally, the site included text-only links to text-only councilmember pages.)

Beyond those “aesthetic issues,” Balducci continued, “the biggest problem is that people need to be able to find what they need, and it’s just not easy. I stopped using the website to search for things that I wanted to find. I would just use Google, because that was far more reliable.”

A spokesperson for King County said the new website templates “were designed to be user-friendly based on modern best practices. The goal was to simplify content for improved navigation, ADA access, and translations.” The county uses Google Translate for all languages other than English.

At Tuesday’s meeting, county Chief Information Officer Megan Clarke, who became head of the IT department in November 2022, said the issues with the website stem partly from a lack of communication between the IT staffers who were creating the new website and the people who would ultimately have to use it. One example of this was when the IT division determined that 90 percent of web traffic went through 10 percent of the pages on the site, and assumed it would be fine to “eliminate 90 percent of the pages and keep the 10 [percent] that were meaningful. … Unfortunately, those assumptions weren’t vetted.”

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works is if this is a partnership.”

In King County IT’s official, written response to the proviso, the department emphasized how many times it met with people from county departments to discuss the website and noting that some departments haven’t reorganized their site content yet in the latest version of the content management system—suggesting, in effect, that the reason “some users experience challenges with finding what they are looking for on Kingcounty.gov” is because county departments aren’t doing their part or signed off on things and later changed their minds.

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works… is if this is a partnership.”

Clarke—taking a more conciliatory tone than the department’s official report—told the council that many of the county staffers who worked on the website didn’t have experience working with the platform they were using and didn’t get the training they needed. “There was not someone in charge who had done this before,” Clarke said. “KCIT was trying to manage something that really required a lot of depth and breadth of voices involved, and that just did not happen.  We treated the website as a project rather than a product.”

Clarke told the council she’s hiring an outside consultant to try to identifying some of the underlying issues with the site, including why it couldn’t handle traffic on a low-turnout odd-year election night, in order to fix some of the most glaring problems. (The King County spokesperson told PubliCola that the IT department did anticipate the spike in traffic on election night, and that “although [the site] initially failed to function properly, KCIT was able to resolve the issue on Election Night”—albeit long after everyone had turned to KING 5’s website, which had the results on time.)

was designed to handle traffic, and only failed when people were seeking results at 8:00, when they’re ordinarily available.

However, she noted, the county is facing a budget deficit; even if Sitecore can support the website for a couple of years after 2027, it doesn’t make much sense to sink more money into the current site.

“I look at it as, how much more do we want to sink in this area [if] we are going to move to something else?” Clarke said. “I’ve seen website projects with twice the number of pages finish on time and on budget. I absolutely know it’s possible.”

PubliCola has reached out to the King County Executive’s Office and the IT department and will update this post when we hear back.

human services, King County

County Council Votes Down Last-Minute Proposal to Cut Levy Funding for Human Service Worker Wages
King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski

By Erica C. Barnett

A King County Council committee rejected a last-minute proposal by King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski to cut $6 million from a five-year plan to improve human service workers’ wages on Wednesday, voting to reject an amendment passed by the countywide Regional Policy Committee (RPC) this past Monday.

Dembowski’s amendment, which went out to RPC members the Friday after Thanksgiving, would amend the spending plan for the voter-approved Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy to reduce funding for human service worker raises by $1 million a year, or between 9 and 12 percent every year the levy is in effect, with the money going to unspecified future capital grants to improve food access

The RPC, which is in charge of approving the levy spending plan before it goes on to the county council, passed Dembowski’s proposal with minimal discussion on Monday. (The amendments didn’t go out to RPC members until the day after Thanksgiving, and the discussion lasted less than five minutes). “We’ve really got a rising need in this county for folks who are hungry,” Dembowski said Monday. While he would have preferred to pass a more generous levy in the first place, Dembowski added, $6 million “didn’t seem to me to have a tremendously adverse impact in the scale of things.”

King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, one of two county council representatives on the RPC, disagreed, telling PubliCola that Dembowski’s amendment “fundamentally changed the proposal by taking 10 percent out of a program that was fundamental to the levy.” Dembowski, she added, “didn’t do any outreach to me” before putting his amendment forward.

“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy. We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”—Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold

Dembowski did not return a call or text messages seeking comment.

Human services providers seemed blindsided by the amendment, which only Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold and King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci opposed at Monday’s meeting. “It was extremely disappointing to see this unfold in a process with effectively no notice, engagement, or opportunity to comment before the Regional Policy Committee took action during a special meeting,” Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said.

But by Wednesday, when a county council committee took up Dembowski’s amendment, providers had mobilized, urging the council not to pit food security against human service providers’ wages. Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said that in the last two days, he had “heard from so many organizations that I work with regularly that they didn’t have an opportunity to make their voice heard on on those changes…. [and] are terrified that depriving them of the needed resources at this time would really jam up their services.”

“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy,” Herbold told PubliCola after the vote on Wednesday. “We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

The levy funding, on its own, isn’t enough to give human service workers a living wags—a fact Dembowski used to argue for repurposing the funds, noting that by his math, $1 million a year across 10,000 human service workers works out to only “about two bucks a week.” But the money, combined with similar increases adopted as part of the city of Seattle’s 2024 budget and in the county’s Crisis Centers Levy, would help keep these workers from falling further behind.

For years, nonprofits in King County have struggled to recruit and retain workers because they can’t afford to pay them living wages, much less competitive salaries. A study conducted by University of Washington researchers in 2022 and released earlier this year found that people who left jobs in human services for jobs in other fields saw their wages increase 7 percent relative to what they would have received if they had stayed in their human services jobs. The 7 percent figure accounts for factors like workers moving into higher job classifications and working more hours, according to the researchers.

Eisinger, from the Coalition on Homelessness, said she was “grateful” to the county council for restoring the funding for human service worker wages. “I hope every elected official in King County understands that achieving our shared goals for the Levy requires a strong human services workforce,” she said.

On Wednesday, Dembowski urged his county council colleagues to support his proposal, arguing that it was too late in the process to start second-guessing amendments now. “It would sadden me if we were to zero this out,” Dembowski said, “and I’m very worried about a whole back and forth at the year-end.” This argument might hold more water if Dembowski himself hadn’t initiated the back and forth with his last-minute amendment moving funds from provider pay into a vaguely defined capital fund, which the council will now have to “zero out” to return things to the way they were.

Had Dembowski made a proposal much earlier in the spending plan discussions about “specific needs at specific food banks, that could have been compelling, but it was at the last minute and the end of the process,” Balducci noted. The RPC will now have to hold a special meeting to reconsider the plan, as amended, and the county council will have to approve it before December 14, when the council starts its winter recess.