Spokane tax vote: Lessons for the state?

My colleague Jim Camden has a great blog post re: two recent local bond issues . And with Olympia mulling the idea of sending a tax hike to voters this year, it seems like there are some broader takeaways here.

Quick background: The city of Spokane wanted $18.5 million; Spokane Public Schools wanted $288 million.

Voters — largely the same between the city and school district — torpedoed the city proposal and passed the school one.

Some lessons:

-Be prepared to spend money to convince voters:

Citizens for Spokane Schools, which was pushing the District 81 levy and bond issue, had spent about $145,000 on its “vote yes for kids” campaign a week before the election, which is the most recent set of records available. Citizens for Public Safety, working on the city bond issue, had spent about $6,600.

-Show voters — explicitly — what they’re buying:

Another problem may have been that the city bond issue was for a fairly amorphous set of projects, such as an evidence warehouse, some new courtrooms, an expansion of an animal shelter. The District 81 bond issue was for specific schools, and the approval margin is significantly higher in the neighborhoods around those schools, presumably because parents who live there know what needs to be done to their kids’ classrooms.

-And be prepared to aim at voters’ hearts:

(The city’s campaign) talked about how prosecutors need to secure evidence better to convict bad guys, and cops need a better firing range. But a better place to keep Fluffy and Rover when they get out of the fenced yard was not as well known.
This is not to suggest that Citizens for Public Safety should have employed a variation of the old National Lampoon cover, with a gun pointed at soulful looking dog and the headline “Buy this magazine or we will shoot the dog.”
Not quite, anyway. But come to think of it, that magazine sold pretty well.