Mayor Brown proudly wears her economist cap and never shy about mentioning her background in economics but in her nearly 2 years as mayor Spokane is bout to impose it’s 5th new sales tax.
11/5/2024 .1% sales tax for police, fire, and municipal courts.
11/5/2024 .1% sales tax for juvenile detention and jails. (city does not have a jail)
8/4/2026 .2% sales tax for STA.
10/6/2026 .1% sales tax for criminal justice and public safety.
10/14/2026. .1% sales tax for community safety and mental health.
These are in addition to 2 city utility tax increases, City Park Tax, and Spokane Public School Tax.
Then you have the state’s expansion of sales taxes to includes previously untaxed services and an additional 6 cents of tax per gallon of fuel.
All of these taxes are regressive tax, that means that all of these taxes place the biggest burden on the poorest people in our community.
You would think that they only possible means of addressing budget issues to is to raises taxes on the poorest people and that simply is not true.
When Mayor Brown was elected it was my hope that she would bring intelligent creative solutions to the table but that is far from what she is delivering.
The STA sales tax could have easily been replaced by advertising on STA buses, or the STA could stop giving discounts to colleges and universities through the UTAP program or some combination of the two.
The city could also start creating jobs and generate income by imposing sanctions on abandon properties. Using abatement codes or nuisance abatement codes the city could impose fines a fees on properties that are not maintained properly by the owners. This would create jobs, and increase revenue while addressing nuisance properties in the city. Imposing a progressive registration fee on chronic vacant storefronts, abandoned commercial buildings, or speculative land investments incentivizes development and penalizes out-of-state corporate property flippers. Targeted sales taxes or surcharge on tickets on commercial entertainment venues, the arena, sporting events at our new venue(s) captures spending from out-of-town visitors.
I am sure that there are other ways of increasing revenue without constantly increasing regressive taxes that place the biggest burden on the poorest people and surely our ECONOMIST mayor with a strong academic background would be a much better person to come up with some creative solutions than I can come up with over coffee and donuts.