Spokane Valley City Council considering placing 0.1% sales tax on the ballot to fund bolstering of police services

The Spokane Valley City Council is considering asking voters to approve a sales tax measure this fall that would be used to meet the city’s stated priority of bolstering its police department.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Spokane Valley city staff detailed recent increases in law enforcement costs for the city, a proposal to add seven positions to the police department and a way to pay for those costs and positions – a 0.1% sales tax.

Following the presentation, the council voted 6-1 to advance the effort, with a first-reading of the proposed ballot measure scheduled for its April 1 meeting. Councilman Al Merkel was the lone dissenting vote, saying he believes “we have the money to support our police.”

“I don’t feel that we need to ask the citizens for more money at this point,” Merkel said.

Spokane Valley is a contract city, meaning a great deal of services are provided by outside entities. While the city’s law enforcement wear Spokane Valley Police Department uniforms and drive around in vehicles sporting the department’s name, all law enforcement services in city limits are provided by the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. The department functions essentially as a precinct.

Police services are the city’s greatest recurring cost, totaling over $41 million, more than half of the city’s 2025 general fund budget. That percentage climbs to nearly two-thirds of the city’s general fund budget when factoring in other related public safety costs like public defenders, prosecutors and judicial and detention services.

Deputy City Manager Erik Lamb told the council Tuesday the cost of that contracted work is expected to rise by $4.7 million over the next three years, as a result of a recent collective bargaining agreement between the county and sheriff’s office deputies. The city has seen costs increase by roughly 5% annually since 2021, Lamb said.

The city is expecting several additional public safety costs down the road, including the impact of an expensive new medical services contract within the Spokane County Jail, the regional 911 dispatch center parting ways with the city of Spokane and potential new caseload standards for public defenders that could mean a need to hire more in Spokane County.

All costs would be on top of what was already a lean budgeting year, with recurring expenditures in the city’s general fund increasing by 6%, while recurring revenue is only expected to grow by 3.8%, according to city records.

Also at play in the council’s public safety discussions is the ongoing effort to meet a consultant’s 2023 recommendation to add 25 deputies to the Spokane Valley Police Department. The council approved and funded 10 of those positions in February 2024, bringing the precinct’s total police force to 101 positions.

The seven positions discussed Tuesday would include four patrol deputies, one school resource officer, a behavioral health deputy and a sexual assault detective that will split time with the sheriff’s office. Their salaries and benefits would cost the city more than $1 million annually, on top of an additional $390,000 in one-time costs, according to city estimates. The county and school district to which the resource officer is assigned would cover the costs for those two positions, Lamb said.

If voters approve a 0.1% public safety sales tax, it would create about $2.6 million in additional annual revenue, Lamb said. He added that an internal analysis estimates that nearly half of all existing sales tax in city limits is paid by visitors, making the sales tax a more attractive model than a property tax.

The city council has famously avoided raising property taxes, opting against their statutorily allowed 1% increase for 17 years straight.

“We don’t really want to go down that route,” Councilman Ben Wick said. “A 1% property tax is $167,000-ish … nowhere near two and a half million dollars to provide officers.”

Wick went on to say the city has few other options than a sales tax to secure the funding necessary to meet the consultant’s recommendations to bolster the Spokane Valley Police Department, without having to make more drastic cuts to other city services.

“We’ve tried to reduce all the other departments as much as we can, and now we’re to the point where we need to consider more vertical cuts,” Wick said. “Do we want to shut down the pools for the summer? Not saying that we want to, and the council chose not to. That would be another $600,000 in savings – still not the same level as what a 10th of a percent sales tax would do.”

The council members who advanced the proposal said they want the voters to weigh in, rather than adopting a tax or funding measure as a board. The council would need to pass an ordinance calling for an election on the matter by the state’s filing deadline of May 2, if its target is the August primary, and Aug. 5, if targeting the November general election.

“I’m well known for not voting for taxes; there’s quite a number of them that have been proposed that I voted against,” Councilwoman Laura Padden said. “However, I’m in favor of letting people decide the kind of police protection that they want.”