Like many, I was surprised to learn on July 26 from a brief front-page Leader blurb that city council was stepping up to fix Port Townsend’s crumbling roads by forming its own Transportation Benefit District (TBD) and meeting August 1 to fast-track funding by placing a new 0.3% sales tax on the ballot.

I was further surprised to receive a considerate email the next day from public works director Steve King letting me know “there is an opening for a committee that would be against the ballot measure. Alternatively, if you are supportive, I can also connect you with the committee for the ballot measure. Either way, we wanted to reach out to you and see if this sparks an interest one way or the other.”

Though I’d written and commented to council about transportation issues in the past, TBD was new to me, so I emailed this back per King’s gracious offer “if you have questions or want to discuss”:

Without knowing any of the details yet, my hot take is I’m glad council is stepping up to accelerate much need-needed road repair. Perhaps this funding step is the way forward given declining state funding and the first “real chance” per your Leader statement. On the other hand, I do have some concerns: This could be taken as putting the cart before the horse in terms of priorities, given council’s consideration of wildly expensive projects like the aquatic center. Ideally core services like road repair should be paid by our existing taxes instead of depending on special assessments or other funding mechanisms, which might be more appropriate for the optional projects. I’m a little leery that the “future street system” and “street projects” might include a lot of expensive and possibly controversial road speed deterrents, landscaping, under-used over-separated bike lanes, etc. (as seen in the Howard St. project) rather than the less-glamorous job of simply repairing roads and ensuring sufficient shoulders for bicyclists (dangerously absent along the Cherry St. arterial). But I realize I’m old-school about this and not necessarily on board with current street engineering best-practice opinions! Despite the worthiness of the TBD cause, ever-growing “tax creep” is creeping me out! Rather than live within its means and prioritize as the private sector has to do, many in the public sector look to tax its way out of fiscal constraints, even while imposing new taxes for pet projects like Paid Family Leave and the half-baked WA Cares Fund. This is an increasing burden on working families and the retired.

 

King responded by phoning July 28 to educate me with a cornucopia of details and background about the city’s road morass and TBD tax plans. I jotted down this summary (as corrected and approved by King):

Steve King said city streets haven’t had any real regular chip seal or pavement repair efforts for 20 years (!), instead just patchwork since state funding dried up in the late 90s, so public works crews are looking forward to starting on that. A lot of other cities started passing TBDs around 2010-2015 so aren’t in as bad shape as P.T. Increased funds would mostly pay for materials, but also restore a missing repair staff position, buy small paving, compacting, and other equipment (some of which they’d earlier begun acquiring), hiring out for the big paving jobs. In the past, street projects would be paid by three grant dollars per city dollar, often (unfortunately) borrowing money for leveraging grants. If the TBD goes through, maybe $200,000 to $300,000 of its $800,000 per year total could be leveraged with grants. About 80% of funds would go to essential street repair, and maybe 20% to ADA upgrades, sidewalks, and speed-calming type improvement projects. King admitted there’s no way to tie the hands of future TBD councils to focus on repair, but he says current city council is totally committed to that, with Thomas and MickHager in particular trying to ensure funds are used for road repair. He said the city is hampered by over $600,000 per year loan payments from the old days, which would have been $600,000 per year higher if Finance Director Connie Anderson hadn’t used some reserves bucks to pay off one of the loans. Otherwise the city mostly did reinvestment and repair projects with the ARPA money for sustainability. The seven-member council would constitute the TBD board, and they’ll decide whether to put it on the ballot at a special meeting tentatively scheduled August 1 at 9am.

 

Concern about Austerity versus Enabling

So I attended council’s inaugural TBD board meeting on August 1 to learn more and offer up my concerns in this Public Comment:

I’m really glad that the council is addressing these essential road repairs and making that such a high priority. And I super appreciate the thinking behind and staff’s work on it. So that’s all good. And I understand that the problem originally arose with changes 20 years ago. But in other ways, we’ve had almost a 20-year bender of not having the actual real road repairs that should have been paid for by basic taxes. Instead we’ve shipped tenements from Canada and we’ve paid consultants a lot for big projects and all sorts of things. Maybe those are good ideas, but the roads should have been fixed first. I appreciate that we’re now waking up and actually addressing this thing that should have been done back then.  But the real question for me is this: Would this tax be part of an overall austerity perspective, or would it be enabling the problems that got us into this in the first place? I also wonder specifically about the the usage of the funds. Looking at the proposal it’s road repair, pavement repair, gravel repair, all that stuff — essentials. Then we have stuff like ADA and upgrades and traffic calming. And to me those all feel kind of discretionary. Those are things that might be good ideas, but traffic calming in particular is a pet peeve of mine, because you might have neighborhoods where you want to have some traffic calming and that’s one thing. And then you have arterials in which traffic calming is just basically a crypto way to reduce the speed limit without reducing the speed limit, which I’m not even sure is a good idea. I really appreciate that only $50,000 out of $800,000 at this point looks to be used for these purposes. But you know this could be shifted in years after. … As a parting shot, I heard that it would cost $750,000 just to keep things going as it is now, and maybe $1.5 million a year to really turn things around. And this tax is only raising 800,000. So I’m wondering to what extent this is going to be enough to turn things around.

 

Curiously, when I asked my core question “Would this tax be part of an overall austerity perspective, or would it be enabling the problems that got us into this in the first place?” — I felt the vibe that council was visibly recoiling at my word “austerity” as a vampire would to garlic or holy water.

Perhaps I was imagining things, but three subsequent council responses picked up on the “austerity” word, starting with Mayor David Faber making the point that:

And as to whether or not this is going to be part of an austerity mindset, or that this is brought about by city deciding to do things differently than pay for road repairs — sure, there have been steps that the city has taken historically that each of us on council wishes we hadn’t, including myself, including some of the decisions we made, such as the Cherry Street building. But that’s in the past.

Through the Financial Sustainability Task Force and our budgeting process for years, I think we have a budget that’s pretty lean overall. There really just isn’t resources to pay for road repair and maintenance.

The city has a bunch of different priorities as well, things that we have to do as a city.

So suggesting that there is at all money to be moved from elsewhere to pay for road repair and maintenance is just completely out of step with reality.

Councilor Libby Wennstrom expanded on how the city found itself without resources to maintain roads:

One of the things to understand about street funding and why things fell apart so badly is that more or less simultaneously as part of a series of statewide ballots, state funding for municipal street repair went away with the car tabs, but at the same time, city governments also got restricted to a 1% annual cap.

And if you’re running inflation (right now we’re running about 5%), and if you have a 1% raise every year, the question doesn’t become, what new projects can we do? It’s like, what do we cut this year?

And over a 20 year period, that’s a 20% shortfall, 25% shortfall, 27% shortfall, etc., so you’re getting farther and farther and farther behind. And the net result of that is having to use debt, just to do grant match to meet those basic needs.

So this is an attempt to kind of re-balance that and I get, “Oh, it would be great if we could actually have a tax base that met our basic requirement needs.” But the reality is that the tax base doesn’t literally meet some of the needs for state mandated things that we have to do. And so street funding keeps coming on to “Oh, we wanna do this, but this has to be on the back burner.”

And over a 20 year period, that gap between that 1% raise, if inflation’s running 3%, 4%, 5% — you’re just gonna keep getting farther and farther and farther behind.

These are all good points, and I appreciate how council is trying to do better and finally take seriously the critical road repair that has been put on the back burner for 20 years. So if Faber and Wennstrom are right that “there really just isn’t resources to pay for road repair,” then that’s a compelling argument for a TBD tax to finally repair roads, because the city is financially strapped and poised to “fall off a cliff.”

But I find that hard to square with council’s longstanding and current practice of always finding money or borrowing against the future for discretionary projects and pricey consultants — from Cherry Street ($2-3 million) to Evans Vista ($10-15 million) to Hybrid Golf Course ($4.4 million) to Aquatic Center ($109 million) — always prioritizing these and other things over basic road maintenance for 20 years.

And I don’t see how council has fundamentally changed its tune so long as it continues to prioritize pet projects over road repair. All that’s really changed is that outcry over roads has gotten so bad that council is proposing a new tax to pay for repairs, without tamping down on its current and future pet projects — that is, without “austerity.”

The Long Road to Catching up on Neglected Repairs

Even worse, the TBD tax risks enabling future councils to reduce even its current patchwork spending on road repair from general funds, because that could now be sloughed off onto the TBD to pay. Councilor Ben Thomas spoke out at the August 1 meeting asking council to commit to doing the opposite:

I just want to reiterate what I said the last time we talked about this topic.  I do think that austerity (I’d rather not word it that way, but I think it’s kind of what’s going on here) as much as we can from the rest of the budget to hopefully match this or something like that is very much in my interest.

I know that it’s a lot of numbers to crunch and they don’t seem to add up, but it does seem like just doing this alone would not be enough to satisfy us. I know we talked about trying to commit something, it’s hard to commit a certain number, but I still have an interest in that.

Mayor Faber disagreed, saying:

We cannot bind future councils. There’s no commitment to doing anything in the future beyond what funds are specifically directed, certain specific buckets. This pot of money is going to be dedicated to these specific purposes listed in the ballot measure and we wouldn’t be able to change what those funds are spent on. General funds are spent at the discretion of the council as a whole. We can decide where those funds are spent.

And to argue for austerity or committing certain dollars in the future to certain specific goals or projects — I think it’s dangerous, selling the future short.

We don’t know what the future priorities of the community are going to be. If the community come demanding certain things, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to necessarily just say we’re going to ignore them.

So I think it’s important to note that while this Council as a whole — all seven of us and the staff have evidenced an intent to do exactly as you’re stating — we’ve all been pushing for repairing our roads. And this very vote that we’re putting on the ballot here is clear evidence of that, along with what we’ve dedicated our banked capacity revenues to.

What the future holds is an open question. I hate the idea of constraining future action based on future need. We don’t know what those needs are going to be.

So even if we could dedicate and guarantee that we’re going to continue putting all the banked capacity funds towards road repair and maintenance, I would be an adamant no on that.

I appreciate where both of these councilors are coming from on this arguable point, as well as the evidenced intent “pushing for repairing our roads” that Mayor Faber speaks of.

But how long can an uncommitted and unconstrained council be counted on to continue this intent? For 20 years past councils put road repair “on the back burner” while prioritizing everything else.  And now a new tax-funded TBD might just make it even easier for future councils to deprioritize road spending completely out of the general fund.

And without general fund contributions, the idea that passing the 0.3% TBD tax would repair all the city’s dangerously defective roads any time soon is illusory, since (according to King) it would still take about 40 years to catch up on all the neglected road repairs!

Since it costs $750,000 just to keep things going as they are now, the $800,000 raised by the TBD tax would mostly just stop the bleeding if not further supplemented.

Fortunately King hopes “maybe $200,000 to $300,000 of its $800,000 per year total could be leveraged with grants,” but even so, we’re still talking maybe 30 years to catch up on repairs — hence Thomas’ misgivings that “just doing this alone would not be enough to satisfy us.”

Concern about TBD Tax Short-Changing Road Repair

Even such slow progress assumes that most all of the TBD tax funds would be used for road repairs, but that’s just a hope which Mayor Faber is “adamant” not to “guarantee.”

My earlier quoted public comment expressed appreciation that “only $50,000 out of $800,000 at this point looks to be used” for purposes other than road repair, but I’m not sure where I got that figure, since King told me “about 80% of funds would go to essential street repair, and maybe 20% to ADA upgrades, sidewalks, and speed-calming type improvement projects” with “no way to tie the hands of future TBD councils to focus on repair.” So that leaves only $640,000 from the tax for roads, less than the $750,000 needed just to keep all the potholes from getting worse.

The Summary Statement for Ordinance 3319 establishing the TBD outlines $100,000 per year needed for “citywide sidewalk/ADA construction, upgrades, and repairs” plus $30,000 for “citywide traffic calming” totaling $130,000, which is in line with King’s 20% estimate.

But it also includes “$300,000 per year investment leverages approximately $1.5 million in grant funds for streets” to pay for projects listed in the current Six-Year Transportation Improvement Plan. Such leverage is great, but how much of these funds would come back to be used for repairing roads, since that’s the focus of only 12 of these 54 listed projects?

 

Despite some overlap, the primary focus of the city’s 54 transportation priorities may be categorized as follows:

• Road repair (12 projects);
• Sidewalks and pavement preservation (11 projects);
• Intersection improvements (6 projects);
• New trails (5 projects);
• Shoulder improvements (5 projects);
• ADA improvements (4 projects);
• Non-motorized improvements for pedestrians and bikes (4 projects);
• Traffic calming (4 projects);
• Boatyard expansion and tree replacement (1 project);
• Downtown parking plan (1 project);
• New street extension through water treatment facility (1 project).

This priority list contains a lot of very worthy projects, but prioritizing them all together and paying for them out of the same “pot of money” with “no commitment” risks putting road repair on the back burner again — even when it comes to the 0.3% TBD tax for which road repair is the poster child!

Among these very worthy projects are other projects that are less worthy and even controversial, but would get smuggled in and subsidized by the new TBD tax instead of paying for road repairs.

In particular, quite a few of these priority projects are dedicated to so-called “traffic calming” — especially when considered together with “pavement preservation” projects involving Edge Lane Roads (ELRs), which force down speed limits to accommodate dangerously combining two-way traffic into a single lane.  This is especially unfortunate when speeds are reduced on previously safe arterials like Fir Street.

Additionally, the TBD ordinance earmarks about $30,000 per year for this traffic calming, claiming it is “one of the most highly requested items for improving roadway safety for bicyclists and motorists.”

Rather than improving roadway safety, many traffic calming initiatives paradoxically do precisely the opposite — planting hazards in the middle of roads, forcing traffic to swerve around “mini-roundabouts” and other obstacles, making vehicles drive too close to each other or in the same lane as oncoming traffic, creating confusion with poorly-understood symbolic street signs explained in tiny print on placards by the side of the road.

The theory seems to be that if you make conditions dangerous enough, maybe drivers will slow down!

The most infamous of these are the much-derided “traffic calming island” hazards in the middle of Washington Street, which Councilor Thomas ruefully called “one of those gifts we’ve given to the public to unite everybody, unfortunately, against us.” The one saving grace of these monstrosities is that they were funded by neighborhood nimbies, but taxpayers are still on the hook for ongoing maintenance.

As I said at a second Public Comment on August 1st:

There are these crying needs for substantial road repairs that should have been done by just regular taxes over the years. And they weren’t because there wasn’t enough money or other priorities were chosen. And so I feel like that is the emergent and essential thing that needs to be done. Then you have other projects like road calming that may be good ideas but to some extent are optional … they’re good but they’re not necessarily essential. Here we’re talking about a 0.3% tax increase to deal with a crying unmet need, so I wish it could have been tied to just that, and let other stuff continue to be funded outside of this tax.

 

My concern with the way the 0.3% TBD tax was structured is that it lumps everything transportation-related into one big “pot of money … spent at the discretion of the council.”

That allows future bad ideas like the Washington Street hazards and other discretionary or controversial projects to be paid for by this new tax money — instead of funding the long-neglected road repairs that everyone agrees must be done and were the advertised justification for the tax.

Port Townsend’s TBD should not stand for “To Be Determined,” risking road repairs returning to the back burner.