The Bellevue City Council nearly halted several years of work to have property owners pay for part of projects expand 120th Avenue Northeast and Northeast Fourth Street, possibly setting up a large policy shift next week.
The council has discussed forming a local improvement district (LID) to pay for approximately $10 million of the $47 million projects for several years now, but a motion at Monday’s from Council Member Jennifer Robertson directed staff to stop work on an LID formation. The motion vote was 3-3, with Council Member Grant Degginger recused because of his work with one of the clients within the LID boundary.
A tie vote is a no vote according to council rules, and now an ordinance to form the LID will be brought forward at the March 7 council meeting, with a strong possibility of another tie vote.
None of the council members expressed reluctance about the projects but took issue with how they were to be funded.
As the motion was coming closer to a vote, City Manager Steve Sarkozy made a rare interjection to the policy discussion. The council has spent many meeting and staff hours preparing the LID, and reversing course now would be irresponsible, he said.
“If you change (funding policy) with nothing new in place then what do you have?” he asked. “We don’t know how to move forward with it. By the time this LID would become final you have time to re-evaluate the whole funding system … You preserve the option, and you have chance to come back and look at it.”
Next week’s ordinance vote does not represent a final decision; it keeps the LID as an option, as Sarkozy said. The final vote on the LID would not come until approximately 2015, after the project is completed, and a concrete dollar figure for the property owners’ contribution is known. But, by voting down an LID, it removes that policy as a method of funding. Furthermore, if the council was not able to find replacement money, the project would be left with an approximately $3.5 million funding gap, said Transportation Director Goran Sparrman. Should that funding not be identified, the project could lose an additional $8.2 million in federal funding.
Nonetheless, several council members, who remain in favor of the projects to widen Northeast 120th Avenue and extend Northeast Fourth Street, said an LID is not the right way to fund this project, as property owners wouldn’t gain a special advantage over every day travelers.
“The last two Decembers we passed our taxing levy ordinances without raising taxes, except for now we want to raise taxes on these people,” Robertson said.
The council decided in December to charge 75 percent of the more than $13 million staff determined the properties would be benefited. But the council retains the ability to decrease that percentage as the process continues if other funding mechanisms are found. At the meeting Monday, Council Member Kevin Wallace suggested moving $3.5 million from the council contingency to cover the gap caused by dropping the LID, but he was forced to withdraw when it was pointed out that the council had not advertised possible changes to the budget.
The three members of council who voted to drop the LID (Robertson, Conrad Lee and Wallace) cited a lack of fairness toward property owners, who would be forced to pay for something that has a much greater effect on the region as a whole, rather than the relatively small group of property owners.
The concept of the LID has been controversial since the start, with property owners protests sending the matter to the Hearing Examiner. During two meetings in October, 13 of 49 property owners and 6 tenants came forward to speak out against the financing plan, without a single property owner or tenant in favor.
Property owners can exercise some control in the process. A 30-day protest period begins following the passage of the formation of an ordinance. If owners and tenants representing 60 percent of the assessed value file written protests, then the LID is dissolved.
