vulnerable people often don’t learn of them until they’re already deep in the hole. “It seems that the penal nature of the property tax scheme in Washington unfairly targets the most destitute,” he said.
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pokane County Commissioner Al French, however, sees the legislation as a misguided piece of populism. “It’s a bad piece of legislation,” French says. “It rewards people that don’t pay their property taxes, and it punishes people who do.” His main objection: Those steep penalties end up funding an important part of the county’s already-stressed budget. “This will rob from Spokane County over $2 million of revenue that we use to pay for public safety,” French says. “That, in my world, is about 20 sheriff’s deputies. Who’s going to get punished by this is those people that pay their taxes and have an expectation of government services.” Volz says the cost to Spokane County wouldn’t be quite that high — it’s closer to $1.2 million to $1.6 million. And Baumgartner argues that it’s a bad practice to rely on people doing the wrong thing to raise revenue. “It’s like setting up a speed trap to fund the government,” Baumgartner says. “It’s just predatory.”
“It’s like setting up a speed trap to fund the government. It’s just predatory.” But Baumgartner’s counterpart in Pierce County, Assessor Treasurer Mike Lonergan, worries that weakening the penalty for unpaid taxes could end up flat-out rewarding scofflaws. Lonergan points to Point Ruston, a sprawling 97-acre waterfront development in the Tacoma area. According to the Tacoma News Tribune, Point Ruston in 2018 owed more than $750,000 in back property taxes, late-fees and interest on a parking garage and other properties. Point Ruston developer Loren Cohen told the Tribune that they’d intentionally decided to delay paying taxes on some properties, arguing it made more sense to “keep that money working, either in an apartment building or buying other land to develop.” Their refusal to pay didn’t just hurt Pierce County. “Point Ruston happens to be half in the city of Tacoma, and the other half in the town of Ruston, a town of 700 people,” Lonergan says. “When their taxes were not paid on time, it was a tremendous burden.” Lonergan notes that the whole reason why the Legislature introduced such steep penalties for unpaid property taxes was that — in the era of skyrocketing inflation and interest rates in the late ’70s and early ’80s — it was smarter for property owners to delay paying taxes as long as possible. Since interest rates are so much lower today, he acknowledges the property tax penalties may seem “extreme,” but there’s no guarantee that rates will stay this low, he says. He worries that reducing penalties might result in more property owners procrastinating, lulling them into a false sense of security until it’s too late. “They’re at risk of losing their entire property,” Lonergan says. “After three years, our job is to auction off your property if you do not pay your taxes.” But Baumgartner counters by arguing that when Spokane County delayed its tax property deadline last year, it had effectively eliminated the property tax penalty for a year, almost as a kind of natural experiment. Yet they saw no decrease in tax collection, he says. For every wealthy Point Ruston example of a rich developer getting away with it, Baumgartner and Volz can point to a more sympathetic example like Sanders. “We had a single mom who had a broken transmission and couldn’t pay her taxes and she was being charged 23 percent,” Volz says. “It really impacts our vulnerable fixed-income folks.” n danielw@inlander.com
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