Could a Sales Tax Hike for Criminal Justice Programs Save the County's Budget?
County council members want to use new sales tax authority to help address a $160 million budget shortfall.
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."
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."