Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell is asking voters for $1.3 billion in property taxes over the next six years to continue and expand city funding for preschool, day care, community college tuition and K-12 programming.
The proposal represents a significant expansion of the $619 million education levy that was passed in 2018 and is expiring at the end of this year.
Harrell said the “Every Child Ready” proposal would usher in “transformative investments that will make Seattle one of the best cities in the nation to start and raise a family, supporting our children from cradle, to classroom, into college and beyond toward successful careers.”
Harrell and the Seattle City Council do not have oversight over Seattle Public Schools, but the city has long funded peripheral education programming, with tax levies dating back to the early 1990s.
In the last decade, though, the city has expanded its role in education, primarily through its growing subsidized preschool program and tuition assistance for Seattle graduates going to community college. The funding has also gone to setting up health centers in Seattle public schools, along with after-school programs and mental health resources.
If passed, Harrell’s proposal would cost the average Seattle homeowner about $650 a year.
Harrell placed the proposed levy in the context of federal spending cuts, and the uncertain outlook for local government funding.
“With the Trump volatility, we think this is a good investment,” he said at a press conference Wednesday.
The proposal splits the funding into several buckets aimed at each stage of development, from preschool to preparing for college to training for finding a job.
The largest bucket would go toward the youngest children.
Harrell is proposing spending about $450 million on the city’s preschools. Originally passed as a stand-alone program in 2014, funding for the city’s subsidized preschool was made a part of the last education levy in 2018. Aimed at those earning below the city’s median wage — which for a family of four is now just under $150,000 — the program would grow by 600 slots to 3,100 a year if the measure passes.
The levy would also spend about $150 million on 1,400 subsidized child care spaces.
The next largest proposed bucket is for supplementary programming for kids in K-12 school. That includes $270 million for after-school activities and education support and $188 million for health clinics and mental health services. The levy also proposes spending $46 million to improve safety at Seattle Public Schools.
Finally, Harrell is proposing spending $82 million on kids who have graduated high school, including two years of tuition to community college for all Seattle public high school graduates.
The proposal will now go to the Seattle City Council, which will review it and consider revisions before voting on whether to send it the ballot. If approved, a vote would likely come this fall.
Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who chairs the council’s education committee, said she was closely involved with the mayor’s office as it wrote the proposal.
“I think this is a really great start,” she said of the collaboration with the mayor’s office.
Since taking office, Harrell has not shied away from aggressive tax measures to fund city priorities. His office wrote and helped pass a new $970 million housing levy as well as a new $1.55 billion transportation levy — both expansions of their expiring predecessors, even when accounting for inflation.
The education levy proposal represents the biggest expansion; in raw numbers, it’s more than double the 2018 levy, but slightly less than that when accounting for inflation.
“There’s always a concern when we’re going to the public, asking people to invest. We’re always concerned about this,” Harrell said. “So we try to collaborate, we try to make the right balance.”
Seattle voters have so far shown no limit for their willingness to sign off on new taxes. The housing and transportation levies passed comfortably and residents overwhelmingly signed off on a new tax on “excess earners” in the city to fund new publicly owned housing.
The proposal comes as the city’s budget is increasingly stretched. A recent economic forecast said elected officials can expect a $240 million gap between revenue and operations over the next two years.
Tax levies are not supposed to fund basic city services; rather, they’re intended for specific programming.
That line can be blurred sometimes, however, particularly regarding the transportation measure. Roughly a third of the Seattle Department of Transportation’s budget comes from the transportation levy.
Seattle Public Schools’ budget is similarly in rough shape, facing a $94 million deficit. This proposal would not help in closing that gap.
