Park District gets a windfall, as full levy rate is restored

Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 24, 2022

The Vashon Park District (VPD) is receiving $210,000 more in property tax revenue this year than it had anticipated when commissioners adopted the district’s 2022 levy last November.

The windfall is an unexpected consequence of a bill the Legislature passed last year to protect VPD from potential future funding cuts, and a mistake the King County Assessor’s office initially made in calculating the bill’s impact on VPD’s maximum allowable 2022 levy.

VPD’s windfall will increase its property tax collections by about 13 percent, resulting in slightly higher property taxes this year — about $32 more for the owner of a $600,000 Vashon home.

Elaine Ott-Rocheford, VPD’s executive director, said in an email that the district will use the additional funds primarily to restore services, mostly in recreation programming, once COVID concerns allow.

She also hinted the extra money could help move up the timeline for an important park project: restoration or replacement of the closed Tramp Harbor dock.

“Potentially, depending upon grant awards we hope to receive for the restoration or replacement of the Tramp Harbor Dock, this additional funding may provide some budget flexibility in contributing to grant matching funds,” Ott-Rocheford wrote.

Budget and levy figures in this article were obtained from VPD documents including budgets and meeting minutes, as well as previous reporting in The Beachcomber on the financial affairs of the park district since 2019.

The long road back to a restored levy rate

In 2019, Vashon voters approved a four-year parks levy that allowed VPD to collect property taxes at a rate of no more than 45 cents per $1,000/assessed valuation, starting in 2020.

In 2020, that 45 cents produced about $1.52 million in revenue, according to VPD budget documents. For future years, the levy amount could increase by no more than 1%, plus new construction, so long as the rate did not exceed 45 cents.

For the tax year 2021, the assessed value of the island actually dropped a little, but VPD could not increase its levy amount by the usual 1% plus new construction, because that would have pushed the levy rate above 45 cents.

So commissioners again adopted a levy with that 45-cent rate, which would have generated only $1.49 million — a little less than in 2020.

However, funding woes hit VPD when Vashon’s Health Care and Fire districts approved 2021 levies, with the cascading effect of creating an 11% reduction in funds to be received by VPD. The funding loss came about because of a Washington law, stipulating that if levies in cities, counties and most special-purpose districts exceed, in total, $5.90 per $1,000, the tax collections of districts given the lowest priority in the law are trimmed until the limit is reached, a process known as “pro-rationing.”

This is what happened to Parks — because of the higher levies imposed by the health care and fire district, VPD’s rate in 2021 had to be trimmed so the $5.90 limit would not be exceeded. That reduced VPD’s rate to about 40.6 cents, which produced about $1.34 million — an 11% cut from VPD’s 2020 funding.

However, all this led to a passage of a bill, introduced by 34th District Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon and passed by the Washington legislature in April 2021, which took VPD out of the pool of agencies included in the $5.90 structure, effective in 2022.

County Assessor delivers good news

Going into 2022, the County Assessor told VPD its maximum levy amount was about $1.54 million. This was based on the 2021 levy they could have collected, but for pro-rationing ($1.489 million), adjusted upward to reflect the 1% plus new construction limit on yearly increases.

Because of increases in assessed values, this would have resulted in a rate of 39.6 cents — and this was the levy amount the VPD commissioners approved in November.

“I figured we would still be subject to the 1% increase limit based on what we would have been, had we not been pro-rationed,” Ott-Rocheford told commissioners at a December meeting. “…So when I received the worksheets from the Assessor’s Office that reflected exactly what I figured, I wasn’t surprised.”

However, in December, Ott-Rocheford told her board of commissioners that the Assessor had contacted her to tell her its office had made a mistake: the bill the legislature passed actually did allow VPD to collect the full 45 cents again in 2022. Ott-Rocheford, subsequently, resubmitted the paperwork to claim the additional tax dollars.

VPD now had a levy amount of about $1.75 million, rather than the $1.54 million the district had thought it was entitled to — an increase of $210,000, Ott-Rocheford told the board.

This increase in funding, she added, had bumped VPD’s cash management reserve to more than $1 million.