The Harrell administration’s delicate dance around shaping a $1.35 billion transportation levy proposal for Seattle has begun. Thursday, Mayor Bruce Harrell unveiled the framework of the levy focused on repairs, replacements, and realignments and not major new street and transit projects.
“No matter how you get around, it will make trips safer, more reliable, and better connected so that every Seattleite is set up for success when they experience our city,” Harrell said about the levy proposal.
Mayor’s Office Summary of the 2024 Transportation Levy Plan:
- The proposal recommends more funding to repair bridges, repave streets, connect neighborhoods to light rail, build sidewalks, and make getting around Seattle safer.
- Levy renewal is a top priority for the Mayor as the current Levy to Move Seattle funds roughly 30 percent of SDOT’s work and expires this year. Transportation levies have funded basic transportation services for 18 years based on public votes.
- The Mayor’s proposal is a draft for public input. Residents and community members may visit the engagement hub to read the proposal and share feedback by April 26.
- In May, the Mayor will share his final proposal with the Seattle City Council. This summer, the City Council will review the proposal and consider referral to voters.
The proposal will make its way through the Seattle City Council before landing on the ballot for the city’s voters this fall. If passed, the funding and spending plan will replace the $930 million previous levy approved in 2015.
The council’s leadership appears set to back Harrell’s plan. “I appreciate Mayor Harrell’s work on this framework for the levy and see we are in alignment on many key issues,” council transportation chair Rob Saka said in a statement. “The Council has a lot of hard work ahead of it to review and improve upon this proposal. I am ready and eager to lead that collaborative effort.”
The levy will increase costs for Seattle property owners. Under the expiring Levy to Move Seattle, the “median assessed value Seattle homeowner” currently pays about $24 per month,” the city says. “This levy proposal would increase the monthly cost by $14 per month for a $1 million home, by $12 per month for a $866,000 home (median Seattle assessment), and by $7 per month for a $500,000 home,” the city said in the announcement of the new plan.
As the proposed levy moves forward, the city is also reshaping its guiding Seattle Transportation Plan that leaders say emphasizes equity and economic development.
Under the plan and with the power of the new levy, the 23rd Ave corridor is an example of the type of transportation investments the city will focus on in coming years with reconstruction and paving, a corridor safety analysis, additional transit investment, and crossing improvements, sidewalk repair, and neighborhood greenway upgrades.
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So they’re raising the levy by 50% (it’s $24 per month for the median house and this will add $12/mo more for the median house). Can we get 50% more potholes filled?
just adjusting the current levy for inflation would be 1.2B. Add in population growth and you can see how this won’t be that different.
You can get all potholes filled if you report them.
Also people forget levies can sometimes impact their rent. It’s just not for a house.
I don’t think people forget that, they just vote for them still because increasing the transportation levy in a major city is a great thing when it’s so desperately needed.
It’s not that they don’t think about how their landlord will just selfishly increase rent to pay for these levy increases (even though no one is even forcing the landlord to take on the cost of owning excess housing, it’s an investment choice subject to losses just like any other investment), but I’d imagine it’s not something most tenants want to dwell on because they’re severly priced out of owning housing for themselves.
The word “selfishly” in your point doesn’t make sense. Renting out property is an economic choice people make. Wanting to continue earning the same amount of economic benefit from it is just logical, neither selfish nor unselfish.
Selfish refers to the choice of the investor (landlord) to pass on their expenses or “losses” incured by taxes, rising costs of homeownership in a city, property degradation, etc., to their tenants, which is unfortunately seen society-wide as costs any renter could be made to subsidize for their landlord, if local laws are allowing (most are). It’s a natural consequence of treating property as a commodity and not just for what it is–shelter–for people to live in and put their stuff in. If we weren’t in a housing crisis, renting would likely be less of an issue, but the rent is high because of lack of supply.
Owning other people’s shelter as an investment source is inherently selfish–not to knock the average mom and pop with a nestegg property–but it’s harder and harder to pretend not to understand this dynamic is occurring when it’s creating swaths of homeless people who can’t afford to rent or own from the pressures created by a housing market without affordable options. We need cheaper housing and also better investment vehicles for people’s retirement, since social security is always underfunded without lifing the cap at $168k.
Sure, selfishly is a value judgement made by me, but it does makes sense.
People like chHill don’t care to recognize that they are paying for a service when they rent…
I’ll bet they don’t expect to walk into a restaurant and only pay exactly what it costs for the food, but not the space, the chefs, the server, the dishwasher etc. plus some profit for the person who organizes the whole thing and runs it, yet they expect that anyone who owns and maintains a building that they rent to other people to live in should do it for absolutely nothing..
I wouldn’t touch real estate with a 10 foot pole.. my parents had rental properties for a while (not here, and no, they never got rich doing it). It was hard work. They had to be available if someone stopped up a toilet or a furnace stopped working at 11pm at night… they had to clean up the messes that people left behind, act as mediators when tenants didn’t get along… they had to know how to paint, do drywall, carpentry, plumbing, roofing, be a real estate agent… and they did it all in addition to their regular 9 to 5.. And these days people think all of that should just be free.. No thanks, giant faceless corporations that farm out all that work and don’t give a crap about you are what you deserve.
As much as you think we disagree, I think we both agree on the massive headache that owning a rental property can be — it’s a massive responsibility to be the owner of someone else’s home on top of your own.
Where you might disagree with me on the solution is that I, and many others, believe maintaining rental housing (with its many lifelong costs and maintenance tasks) is simply too complicated and diverse in its requirements for private capital to simply manage it. The richest country in the history of the world could take care of so much of the rental demand (through existing taxes) by repealing the Faircloth amendment to the housing act of 1937, which put a hard limit on the number of public housing units able to exist simultaneously. The federal government limits our housing options and is partially to blame for Seattle’s housing crisis.
Restaurants are not a “necessary” service like shelter. Food is, which is why the government MASSIVELY subsidizes our nation’s agricultural industry with our taxes, but I obviously have no problem with non-essential private businesses selling whatever lasagna donuts they want within the law and at whatever price they can get away with. The key here is that shelter is too essential for the private market to be entrusted to always handle it ethically, especially in the face of crises like the pandemic. If the government owned the apartments that stopped paying rent in 2020, the government still owes the government it’s own money that it prints…it doesn’t encounter the same issues that a private mortgage holding landlord would (i.e. debt), and everyone stays in their house safe and housed, and the government is still backing everything with arbitrarily valued fiat.
Real estate investors are just scared that the made up price of their building will fall, because everyone who owns property in an expensive area knows that the price is purely dictated by demand, which is currently high due to scarcity.
All this to say, raising taxes on the rich works the best for solving major budget issues! Fund the levy and fund public housing!!
Unlike your comment, with it’s ideologically superior references to selfishness and “excess housing,” this is actually a more reasonable proposed levy than the previous one. The percentage increase is smaller and the emphasis is on maintenance and improvement rather than giant projects. Sure, there is a lot of money dedicated to bikes, etc., which I could quibble with, but the overall tone of spending is better.
Landlords will charge the highest rent that the market will bear. Levies only impact supply if it restricts the amount of new housing built (or existing housing taken off the market). Levies are unlikely to have any impact on demand.
I would be more likely to vote for this levy IF the CIty/SDOT was actually doing something about the horrible state of our roadways. They are not.
The roads will never be nice if we continue to allow an ever-increasing number cars to drive on them, and additionally continue to tacitly accept the increase in size of the average car.
Cars, as a mode of transport, destroy their own infrastructure faster than any other mode of transport due to massive effects of vehicle friction, weather, seismic activity, and most of all OVERUSE due to decades of auto-focused planning.
Massive current and future investment in public transit is the only way to permanently reduce potholes, because it concentrates more riders into fewer trips. But alas, that costs money too! So, either continue to get choked out by exhaust and keep complaining about the ever increasing number of potholes that will never be able to be filled before the next one shows up, or just back the funding of public transit projects and enjoy your lovely cleaner and quieter city.
Incorrect. In actuality, heavier vehicles do more damage to pavement than lighter ones. So buses do more damage than cars. Yes, we need buses of course, but we also need road maintenance budgets that keep the roadways in good condition. Lots of our bus routes provide bone rattling rides because of poor roadway conditions. More people would probably use the buses if the roads were in better condition.
And road maintenance is just about filling potholes. Potholes occur because the pavement has already deteriorated. Once potholes start to form, it’s time to remove and resurface the pavement.
A huge chunk of money in this levy is marked for roads repaving (much more than last time I believe). I’d say it’s a big step in the right direction.
I don’t think we’re going to agree on this, but the levy needs to be doubled, with the extra money going purely to maintenance instead of capital projects.
Also, Washington State allows studded tires from November 1 through March 31st. There’s a large amount of drivers, including Seattle, that unnecessarily put them on for the statutory maximum (or longer), with no yearly fees or taxes required beyond a $5/tire tax at point of sale.
Studded tires cause significant damage to roadways, probably $100 million dollars per winter statewide. Seattle’s share of that is probably $10 million, which is significant considering SDOT’s maintenance budget is around $40 million.
Either reducing (or eliminating) the allowable times for studded tires and/or imposing a yearly fee or license seems like low hanging fruit. I understand there are parts of the state that legitimately need studded tires, but the greater Puget Sound area does not.
I actually like this… If you read carefully, the proposal has much more investments back to roads and bridges, and focus on improving existing buses and built-out RapidRides. They are not asking money to build even more fancy projects…
It’s good to be back to basics as Seattle roads and bridges are just insanely under-maintained.