(The Center Square) – Despite recently proposing her own, Mayor Lisa Brown is asking the Spokane City Council to claw back a sunset clause on former Mayor Nadine Woodward’s temporary tax increase.
Brown issued her 2025-2026 budget proposal earlier this month, which could close Spokane’s $25 million deficit. Woodward faced a similar situation last year but opted for one-time funds among other solutions, which included a temporary 1% increase in the city’s utility taxes.
The city council passed the increase last December with the promise that it would sunset the 21% utility tax back down to 20% at the end of 2024, meaning collection at the higher rate would stop. However, Matt Boston, Spokane’s chief financial officer, asked them to repeal that clause on Monday.
“The current administration is needing to utilize that tool as well in the next biennium,” he said during the council’s Monday committee meeting.
While Brown’s Community Safety sales tax was passed by voters on the ballot, unlike Woodward’s utility increase, both included sunset clauses. Brown’s new sales tax expires in about 10 years, with Woodward’s sunsetting at the end of this year.
Sunset clauses are legally binding, but Brown didn’t include one on the ballot language, so the council can technically repeal it without voter approval like her administration is asking them to do now.
Councilmembers Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle pushed to include a sunset in the ballot language for Brown’s sales tax, cautioning against what she’s going for now. However, most of their peers decided otherwise, waiting to pass it until after the measure reached the ballot.
“The ultimate guardrails here is that every other year, you get to elect new council members,” Brown said before the election last month, “and you also get to be the ones that make the decision on this measure.”
While the Brown administration is only asking to repeal the sunset on Woodward’s 1% utility tax increase, it sets the precedent Bingle and Cathcart warned their constituents about.
“Is there any heartburn at all over the fact that this was kind of committed to as a one year, one time only, reiterated over and over again because I kept asking over and over again,” Cathcart asked Boston. “I mean, are we not concerned about the trust of the people we represent?”
Brown’s budget proposal includes a few assumptions to balance out the $25 million general fund deficit, but maintaining Woodward’s temporary 1% utility tax hike was not listed as one.
According to Monday’s agenda, the current 21% rate taxes solid waste collection services, public wastewater and treatment operations, “and the selling or furnishing water for hire.”
Boston clarified that it covers utility taxes incurred by the city and what’s collected from Avista Utilities and others, adding that he believes the administration still intends to sunset the 1% later.
“I know on council when we discussed that 1%, it was going to be for one year,” Council President Betsy Wilkerson said, “and that is challenging Councilmember Cathcart, but so is a deficit.”
