Seattle mayor boosts price of city’s biggest-ever property tax proposal

A month after Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell released his plan to update the city’s complex transportation system with the largest property tax levy proposal in Seattle history, he came back Friday with $100 million added to the plan.

At a news conference Friday, Harrell called the now-$1.45 billion proposal an “investment strategy that listens to everyone” and said he was “leading by listening.” 

“We are aggressively staying aligned with what people want,” Harrell said, noting that the city used polling, roundtables and questionnaires, engaged with 60 organizations, and held numerous meetings to amend the proposal.

Greg Spotts, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, called it a month of “extensive dialogue.”

“If I were to summarize what we heard, I could put it into two words: Yes, and,” Spotts said. “We heard a lot of great ideas on how we can make the package even better.”

In its current form, the eight-year levy would cost the owner of an $866,000 home, the median price, about $41 per month, roughly $17 more per month than the current levy, according to SDOT.

The City Council weighs in next with what to send to voters in the fall.

Aside from the increase in spending, the levy proposal is largely unchanged. It plots out eight years of repaving busy streets, maintaining bridges, building and repairing sidewalks, improving access to transit and expanding the city’s bike network.

The levy funding has become key to SDOT’s operations, and accounts for about 30% of its budget. Voters gave strong approval to the previous levies, which have funded work from 2006 through the end of this year.

Recent polling by the city, in March and December 2023, has shown continued support for such levy proposals. In the most recent poll, 64% of respondents supported essentially approving the 2015 levy, but that support slipped to 56% for a bigger levy of about $1.7 billion.

Reservations about the proposed levy may be reflected in the City Council, which is dominated by members who have said the proposal should focus on bridge work, pothole repair and repaving projects.

Councilmember Rob Saka, who leads the council’s transportation committee, called the mayor’s proposal a “strong foundation” and said he looked forward to working collaboratively with the mayor to improve it.

“Building and maintaining bridges, roads, sidewalks, bike lanes, and buses may seem like the boring work of government, but few things shape the way we interact with our city and connect with each other more,” Saka said in a Friday statement. “We have a tremendous responsibility to get this right and deliver the everyday basics in an extraordinary way.”

The council will begin reviewing, amending and potentially approving the levy Tuesday before it heads to the November ballot. If approved by voters, it will replace the $930 million levy voters approved in 2015 that expires at the end of this year.

The $100 million added to what was already an expansive $1.35 billion proposal.

An additional $3 million was put toward a Bridge Preventative Maintenance Program for the city’s 134 bridges. The levy proposal now has $221 million dedicated to repairing bridges and preparing for future bridge work. Spotts said the levy would help the city be more “proactive” in maintenance and put it on better footing to compete for big dollar federal funding opportunities.

The updated proposal also pushed an extra $26 million to sidewalk repair, which includes a promise to build 250 blocks of new sidewalks in four years.

About $23 million more will go toward improving transit corridors and connections, for a total of $145 million. Besides work to improve bus reliability and safety, and access to Link light rail stations, the proposal names streets that support routes 3, 4, 31, 32, 50, 106 and 128 as its initial projects.

Spending on bicycle safety comes to $114 million, up $20 million from the draft proposal, to expand the city’s protected bicycle network and create better routes connecting schools and dedicated paths.

Finally, $10 million was added to help expand Seattle City Light’s publicly available electric vehicle chargers.

To emphasize the levy proposal’s priorities, the mayor stood Friday in Fritz Hedges Waterway Park, with the Ship Canal and University bridges behind him. He was flanked by some of the advocates who helped shape the proposal’s revision, including César García of the Lake City Collective; Kirk Hovenkotter, executive director of Transportation Choices Coalition; Rachel Smith, president and CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce; and Anna Zivarts, with Disability Rights Washington.

They praised the updated proposal, and Zivarts said that the 30% of Washingtonians who don’t or can’t drive, a number “probably higher in Seattle,” would be helped by the levy.

Near the end of his remarks, Harrell cast the proposal as not just a good investment, but necessary to confront climate change.

“Everything we talk about is not just for our next generation of people, but for our planet and our air and our water,” he said. “So we think these are wise investments.”

And he noted that he wasn’t trying to please every Seattleite, but was intent on listening to everyone — even if he recognized not everybody would support it.

“I hope this package meets the needs of 51% of the people — I’m just joking — meets the needs of this great city because we know they are hungry for a great transportation system,” he said.