Property Tax Levy 2023 (and a few words about sex trafficking)

Commissioners,

It’s with an increasingly heavy heart I take in your  discussion of the Property Tax Levy every year now. Despite your claims to be the most progressive commission ever, the tax levy is evidence that your relationship with the cities under the flight path, especially fence line communities like Des Moines, is steadily becoming less equitable with each passing year.

The optics on projects, like wind farms and gender-neutral restrooms are fabulous. But for airport communities they ring hollow and in fact are a distraction from one simple fact. While you continue to make more revenue, the amount coming back to the communities directly impacted by the airport continues to decline.

The tax levy is particularly regressive to cities like Des Moines and Burien for three big reasons.

• As you well know, you always take the lion’s share of the tax levy to pay off your bonds. We literally pay you to expand the airport and increase the noise and pollution over our heads.
• The tiny percentage of that levy which provides grants for economic and environment is simply a redistribution of our own money.
• And even then, much of it is left on the table because so often there are not even groups to apply for the money that is available.
• And worst of all, that redistribution does not map equitably onto communities based on either need or harms, since it is diffused across all of King County. It does not take too much imagination to hold four images in your mind:
  • The population distribution around the airport
  • The aircraft emissions
  • The noise
  • A distribution of the dollars that flow back to that population

Your system provides almost no correlation between those four domains. And if you were really ‘progressive’ or ‘equitable’ you would stop accepting pat answers as to what is ‘possible’ and simply direct your talented staff to finding a way to make mitigation a function of impact.

In fact, there are two simple paths to address this:

• Give Des Moines and Burien, the two cities most directly affected by those negative impacts, the same deal you struck with SeaTac. There is no legal constraint other than the doctrine of ‘public gifts’. To address that, the Port agreed to swap ‘permits’ for ‘public safety’. There is no logical connection between those two ideas. It was simply a way to offer an in-kind value. And thus, there is no reason you could not find another appropriate form of trade in each city to provide similar justice for both Des Moines and Burien.
• Rebate our share of the tax levy. Again, not as impossible as your staff makes it sound. A legislative mechanism could be found at either the County or State level through RCW 53. You simply have to ask for it and I’m fairly certain both governments would go along–just as they did in 2020 with the Port Package update plan.

Either approach would have a multitude of benefits.

• First of all, we wouldn’t have the insult of paying you to increase the noise and pollution over our heads.
• Second it would completely remove the whole Rube Goldberg administrative costs at both ends of the equation. No more outreach, matching shenanigans, approval processes. You should love this for the paperwork reduction alone.
• Third, as you know, the lifeblood of any City is structural revenue, not grants. You could provide us with the predictable revenue stream which you have slowly taken away over the years (and benefit from as landlords!) via property buyouts at locations such as the Des Moines Creek Business Park.
• And last but not least, we know our needs better than you ever will. So one wonders why the Port would even feel a need to try, when there is already a much more efficient way for all parties. All we really need is your expertise on an on call basis (eg. an arborist, raptor expert, or biologist can come in handy in a city with, oh I dunno, a Green Cities Partnership.)

This approach would be an order of magnitude more helpful to our communities than any program you might devise. In fact, the main benefactor of the current system is the Port of Seattle public relations department. Every grant makes for a photo-op so awesome the grant pays for itself in terms of publicity. That’s not snark, that’s the truth.

Sincerely,