Clyde Hill News: Administration pushes new utility tax
Unanswered questions from last year’s discussion on a stormwater utility
The season of great views around Clyde Hill continues. From a walk last week:
Apologies for the late newsletter — out of town guests and some surprises resulted in this special Monday edition.
One more item before our disclaimer: if you find this newsletter useful or interesting, please forward it to your Clyde Hill neighbors and friends. Thank you!
Disclaimer: while I am a councilmember on the Clyde Hill City Council, I write this newsletter in my capacity as an individual resident. Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the position of the City. The information and references here are from public sources. I welcome email responses — and if the topic is about City business I will respond from my City email account.
Budget Advisory Meeting
Last week’s Budget Advisory Committee meeting was a mostly uneventful walk-through of financial policies and structure (slide deck here, link).
For example, the General Fund is the main account and discussion topic for budgeting, used for salaries and operating the City. There’s also a Reserve Fund that holds the City’s past surpluses, and a Projects Fund used for capital project expenses like facilities and stormwater.
Some funds are restricted. For example, the City of Clyde Hill received about $946,000 in funding from the Federal government via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. Those funds can be used for some expenses (e.g. premium pay for essential workers) but not others (e.g. regular baseline salaries).
Recommended priorities & a new utility tax
The discussion of City priorities during the latter part of the Budget Advisory Committee meeting illustrates some of the challenges the City has around planning and executing.
Let’s start with a specific item on the list of recommended priorities: “Formation of a stormwater utility.” The gist of this item involves setting up a new tax on Clyde Hill residents to fund the maintenance and improvement of stormwater drainage in the city.
Unanswered questions
Last year, after spending over $19,000 on consultants to recommend a plan (link), the Administration asked the City Council whether to proceed with a stormwater utility or wait. In August 2021, the City Council explicitly answered with its decision
to wait for further internal information that we [the City] generate ourselves. Then we will have a better position to be able to tell if we want to have a consultant then go through the process that they make their money for. (link)
The questions and feedback in August 2021 were quite clear. However, it appears there have been no answers or responses from the Administration about the utility since that meeting.
No plan
Last week, after the recommended priorities were presented, Cm Friedman asked “What’s the plan — what do we do with this?” (link) He added that he’s “looking for more detail.”
The gist of the response from the Administration was that they’re going as fast as they can, these things take time, and that it’s not clear when these details will be available.
At the end of the meeting, under “What to Expect Next,” the Administration included “Consensus on top city-wide priorities” and “Presentation of 2023 Preliminary Budget reflecting these new priorities.”
There’s no clear path or plan from where the meeting ended to a consensus. The gist of the response from the Administration to questions about getting to a consensus acknowledged that it’s difficult and that the Administration is doing the best it can (link) without specifics about the how.
The City’s Director of Finance did offer that they were “having a really hard time discerning if there’s any consensus at all on” these priorities.
What now?
From a resident’s point of view, it’s not clear what happens now. The Administration will continue its budget work. There will be another City Council meeting in three weeks, with another Budget Advisory meeting two weeks after that.
For the priorities listed, there are still many unanswered questions. Neither the plan nor the plan for a plan for many of these topics is clear. For example, just looking at the first slide:
The Administration has warned about deficits. The City’s operating expenses exceed its operating revenues (item 2). There’s no document that sets out the problem and approaches.
Under “staffing needs,” the Administration has “create a dedicated Public Records Officer position” (item 4). Council has asked questions for months about problems in this area; to date, the Administration has not been able to report activity clearly here, much less describe a problem and path to solution.1
The Administration has a new call to replace City Hall and create “a consolidated municipal campus.” This is separate from the current plans for (1) the new fire station that the City of Bellevue is paying for and (2) updates to City Hall, for example to accommodate hybrid in-person/online meetings because of COVID that are already in process. It’s not clear to me what problems replacing City Hall will address or where this municipal campus idea is coming from.
Thanks for reading! Please forward and share with your friends and neighbors, and if you are not already getting this newsletter, subscribing is both easy and free.
Dean Hachamovitch