Clyde Hill News: City’s deficit projection climbs to $4.3m; Mayor agrees city has “crisis”
Mayor: “I’m not asking to do a full-time job”
City staff increased Clyde Hill’s “Total Deficit 2025-2030” projection to $4,292,976 at Thursday’s meeting of the Financial Sustainability Task Force, reflecting the widening gap between the city’s expected operating revenues and planned expenditures. The city’s previous estimate at the end of October was just shy of $3.5m (link).
The updated financial projection includes revenues from a new “stormwater utility,” effectively a new tax on residents, which the city council has not yet approved. The administration has not explicitly communicated to residents the city’s plans for the new utility and fees or what additional benefits residents can expect from it. Without a stormwater utility, the deficit will be even larger.
Former Councilmember and long-time resident Bruce Dodds, serving on the task force, said that “We have a crisis in the city and that requires a different level of communication with the residents.” (link)
Mayor Steve Friedman, when asked if he agreed with this assessment that the city has a crisis, said “Yeah. I’ll go that far.” (link)
Mr. Dodds added:
residents of the city need to know that we’re working on a solution to this and ultimately if we don’t come up with an acceptable solution to this — that the city could theoretically go bankrupt… I mean that’s where we’re going. (link)
The city’s budget deficits have been a long-running problem:
According to the mayor, the task force effort is “not just about raising taxes:”
“to the extent that we can identify other aspects of our operations that can reduce the deficit, that’s part of the plan as well. It’s not just about raising taxes.” (link)
Cm Brad Andonian commented that a tax increase is at best “a short-term fix. It’s not a long-term solution.” (link)
Assistant City Administrator Maia Knox discussed the need for “messaging” to the community, explaining that
“the residents here get the benefit of living in a predominantly single family community, low density… that’s something you have to pay for and the people who have to pay for it are the residents” (link)
continuing “I don’t know how you message that in a way that makes residents feel good about” it. The Assistant City Administrator suggested that the city could tell residents
if we were to get additional funding, we would feed it into the police department — and of course on the back end we would then reallocate [it] to other [city] services. (link)
In response to a question about helping reduce the deficit by moving toward Yarrow Point’s operating model, with the mayor doing more of the day-to-day work of city administration, Mayor Friedman responded “I’m not asking to do a full-time job.” (link)
Analysis and more details about the meeting, below.
Disclaimer: while I am a council member 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. City 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.
Shortcut: how this all ends
Ultimately, Clyde Hill will either find some combination of increasing revenues and decreasing expenditures or it will merge into a neighboring municipality.
Framing the effort
Mayor Friedman kicked the meeting off with a clear framing of the goals of the effort (link). The Mayor noted that the effort “requires that we all have an open mind” and “I look for constructive options and directions from everybody.”
Questions, unanswered
The meeting materials discussed included an extensive and thorough census of the activities of city administration (link and link), as well as an org chart:
One resident asked for a framework or taxonomy in which to make sense of all the activities, services, and costs and have this conversation.
The request echoed the many entreaties residents made during months of budget meetings across October, November, and December of 2024 for specific options and not just a “laundry list” of costs. Wayne Burns, a task force member who could not attend Thursday’s meeting, submitted a two-page public comment (link), including requests that the city answer residents’ questions dating back to October.
When pressed about unanswered questions, Cm Sinwell responded:
“we could just make an evergreen document as part of this task force just to say appendix X and just have the questions out there and as they get answered, we’ll fill them.” (link)
It was explained that “it was premature” to provide answers and that “people want answers today, but the answers won’t reveal themselves until the process yields some sort of outcome.”
According to Mayor Friedman, the unanswered questions are important to address in order to raise taxes:
“you can’t go in tomorrow and say let’s go do X to raise revenue because they’re not ready for that. They don’t feel comfortable because they want to know these other questions are answered.” (link)
“An unproductive exercise”
Another unanswered question originally asked in October and asked again Thursday was “Has anyone crafted a budget that fits expected revenues?” (link)
The leaders of the task force declined to answer, calling it “an unproductive exercise.” (link)
“Disagreeing on facts”
During the meeting, participants disagreed on objective verifiable facts.
Claim: City headcount has been flat, or at most increased by one, over the last twenty something years. Factually, according to an email to residents from the city’s Finance Director last fall, the City had 17 full-time employees in 2003, while in 2024 there were 21.
Claim: Assistant City Administrator Knox claimed that the cost of the city’s police rose faster than costs of the rest of the city. Factually, unsubstantiated — Cm Sinwell disagreed and offered to share his analysis.
Claim: The tax burden on residents in Clyde Hill is half of what Bellevue residents pay, according to the Assistant City Administrator: “A house with the same assessed value… in Clyde Hill versus Bellevue — Clyde Hill residents will pay half the amount of property tax as that same house will in Bellevue” (link). Factually, a Clyde Hill resident with a $1,000,000 house would pay $7,148.49 to King County while a Bellevue resident with a $1,000,000 house would pay $7,808.84 in 2023-24, according to the most recent data available on the King County Assessor website (link).1
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Dean Hachamovitch
Of those taxes, $319.86 would go to Clyde Hill while Bellevue would receive $610.59, along with an additional $369.62 in voter-approved taxes. Looking at the additional services Bellevue provides (parks and recreation, for example), that makes some sense.