Spokane voters passing sales tax hike by wide margin in first year victory for Mayor Lisa Brown

In a victory for Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown, voters are approving a sales tax increase that will help pay for a number of Brown’s campaign pledges despite an otherwise cash-strapped city budget.

“This is what I ran on,” Brown said Tuesday night. “Community safety has clearly been on the top of everybody’s mind.”

Proposition 1 was passing with 58% of the vote on election night.

If approved, the proposition would increase sales taxes within city limits by 0.1% – or $1 for every $1,000 in eligible purchases, which don’t include basics like groceries and medicine – and raise an estimated $7.7 million annually. Of that, 15% will go to Spokane County, as required by state law.

While the proposition itself raises those taxes permanently, the Spokane City Council in October approved guardrails for the tax hike that would end it after 10 years and segregate the funds to make it clearer how they are being spent; notably, however, because those guardrails were not included in the ballot language itself, they could simply be removed by future councils.

Brown has pledged that the roughly $6.5 million going to the city each year would be spent on various community safety investments, including replacing aging firefighting equipment and vehicles and hiring new neighborhood resource officers, among other investments.

“I think this gives us a solid path forward,” Brown said.

Unions for both the Spokane Police and Fire departments endorsed the measure, as have some other key constituent groups, such as the newly created Spokane Business Association.

That latter organization’s lukewarm support for the tax hike became more vocal in recent weeks after concessions from the administration, including a recent emphasis on policing homeless people sleeping downtown.

There was no concerted effort to defeat the measure to counter efforts by the fire and police unions to secure its passage. Despite indications in a recent poll that city residents feel overburdened by taxes and have low trust in their local government, enough appear to have been convinced that more cops, updated fire equipment and other investments were worthwhile.

A new source of cash will bring some relief to city leadership, given how tight the budget has been this year.

Brown came into office in January facing a $25 million deficit in the city’s general fund, the city’s most flexible bucket of money, which pays for, among other things, most police and fire services, and the city was as much as $50 million in the red across the entire budget. Former Mayor Nadine Woodward had also aggressively spent down the city’s savings during her term to balance prior budgets.

The Brown administration has managed to narrow that gap through a series of cuts, early retirement incentives and at least a handful of layoffs, producing a proposed 2025-2026 budget that is balanced. But as residents demand better city services, particularly from the police department, the city had few options to hire more personnel while simultaneously cutting costs.