(The Center Square) – With business offices emptying out and companies shrinking their corporate footprint, King County is shifting its tax burden to homeowners.
Residents will bear the majority of more than $7 billion in property taxes this year as Washington’s commercial sector will pay a little over $1 billion.
During a King County Budget and Fiscal Management Committee meeting on Wednesday, King County Assessor John Wilson said the county will collect $7.6 billion in property taxes across all of King County. Out of that total, the ratio between residential and commercial is normally around 65% for residential and 35% for commercial.
However, in 2024 the Department of Assessment's numbers show residential taxpayers will pay 83% of the $7.6 billion in property taxes being collected this year. The commercial sector – which includes corporations like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google – will pay $1.3 billion [17%].
“It infuriates me to think that 83% of the property tax revenues are coming from residential taxpayers, because I know too well from being out in the community that property taxes are becoming a struggle for them to pay,” Wilson said during the meeting. “We should be a better state and a better county than to set a burden on those who are the financial backbone of our community.”
King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski noted that the shift in ratio may be driven by empty offices, as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to ripple through 2024 and into 2025. The drastic change in ratio is best described as an evolutionary process over the last four years.
In wake of the pandemic, the residential market remained stable and boosted up significantly in many other cases as a result of property owners resizing and buying new property while they were working from home.
Since people were working from home, a lot of businesses found that their revenues and their taxable values were declining as a result.
Washington is a budget-based state, meaning the amount of revenue demanded for local government stayed stable or increased in part because of the pandemic.
“You had a situation where you had rising revenue demands, stable and or rising residential values, but you had very dynamic and variable values coming out of the commercial sector. And so that causes a shift from commercial to residential,” Wilson explained to The Center Square in a phone call.
In the case of 2024, Wilson said the widening ratio is an outlier among recent years “to some extent.”
King County is continuing to grow in population and construction along with it. The county’s new construction totaled more than $10 billion this year. This is the fifth consecutive year that the county reached the $10 billion threshold in new construction.
Last year, the county collected $11.5 billion in new construction. That alone resulted in $19 million in new revenue. That was the second-highest new construction revenue collected by the King County Assessor’s Office
For every $100 million dollars in new construction value, $160,000 goes to King County in the first year. Over five years, that $160,000 becomes $800,000. In 10 years, it’s worth $1.7 million. And in 20 years, it will grow to $3.6 million in revenue for the King County government, according to Wilson.
Wilson said his office will go to the state to seek changes to the property tax system to address this issue and provide more property tax relief to working-class residents and small businesses.
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