Washington Legislature: Supermajority on levies stays

OLYMPIA – A proposal that would make it easier for school districts to win voter approval for property tax levies failed today in the state Senate by three votes.

“I don’t think it is over,” said Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane. She said the bill may come back up for a vote this session.

Despite an earlier assurance that many Republicans would likely vote yes if Democrats agreed to an amendment, most GOP senators voted no. Several said they don’t want to make it easier to raise property taxes, which are already high.

The Senate is the battleground for the measure, badly wanted by rural and suburban school districts that sometimes struggle to win the required 60 percent supermajority to pass their levies. The state House of Representatives has repeatedly voted in favor of reducing the requirement to a regular 50-percent-plus-1 simple majority.

The vote needed to get 33 votes in the Senate; it got 30.

Colville schools last year failed twice at passing a levy, the second time coming just 61 votes short of the required 60 percent. Kettle Falls in 2005 passed its levy – on the second try – by just three votes.

Brown said the vote Wednesday was partly an attempt to see who among Republicans would vote yes. During a panel discussion at Seattle’s City Club in January, she said, Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, predicted widespread GOP support for the measure if Democrats agreed to allow levy votes only on the main November ballot. (As things stand now, the school budget schedule typically requires that levy elections be held in the spring, when fewer people vote.)

With that change, Brown quoted Hewitt as saying, GOP votes would “be there in a heartbeat.”

So she called their bluff. To the chagrin of longtime proponent Sen. Tracy Eide, D-Federal Way, Democrats agreed to an amendment allowing levy elections in November.

“A half a loaf is better than none,” Eide sighed.

But she didn’t even get a slice. Even with the change, all but two Republicans voted against Senate Resolution 8207, which would still need voter approval if it clears both legislative chambers.

Hewitt said after the vote that, yes, his position on the bill had changed. Many Republican senators are unhappy with the amount of money the governor and Democratic lawmakers are proposing to spend over the next two years, he said. They’re also unhappy that a Republican bill to restrict property tax increases to 1 percent a year is bottled up in committee.

“I think we’ve had a lot of change of heart,” he said. “Those kinds of things tend to change your mind.”

And Hewitt said he told Brown that Wednesday morning.

“She said ‘We’re going to run it and see where the numbers are anyway,’ ” Hewitt said.

In debate before the vote, Eide said schools desperately need to have it easier to pass their tax levies, particularly as they shoulder more of the burden traditionally paid for out of state coffers. Washington is one of only seven states that still require a supermajority for school levy votes, she said.

When levies fail, she said, “our children lose, ladies and gentlemen. They lose.”

Sen. Janea Holmquist, R-Moses Lake, said that Republicans are leery of making it easier to raise property taxes. She noted that the supermajority requirement stems from a 1932 citizen initiative.

“I’m going to be siding with the property owners on this,” said Holmquist. “Bottom line, this is a property tax increase.”

She predicted that cities, counties, fire districts, hospital districts and other taxing districts would follow, asking for the same thing.

One Democrat who voted against the measure said it was a protest vote over the Legislature’s unwillingness to allow Seattle voters to tax themselves more. Seattle passes its school levies, he said. But the state limits how much they can tax themselves.

“I’m tired of ‘Washington Yearns,’ ” Sen. Ken Jacobsen, D-Seattle, said, referring to Gov. Gregoire’s much-touted effort to reform education. “Seattle wants to spend more money on their kids.”

“I guess I could say that Spokane doesn’t need this either,” Brown responded, “because Spokane always passes its levies. But I care about the kids in the whole state.”

And she said that broader help for schools is on the way. Lawmakers plan to revise the complicated funding system and “over the next several years will start ramping up” the amount of money for schools, she said. The simple-majority vote, she said, “is just step number one.

“And maybe we won’t get step number one today,” she said moments before the measure failed. “But we’re going to keep trying.”