King County Transportation District members debate potential sales tex distribution

Published 4:00 pm Friday, April 10, 2026

Action on a possible 0.1% sales tax to fund unincorporated road projects has been deferred again.

The King County Transportation District met April 4 to discuss the sales tax, which would fund King County’s Roads Services Division and help mitigate an annual $200 million budget shortfall, which has plagued the department for several years.

Possible action on the sales tax was deferred to the April 20 special meeting; the current debate is over whether any funds would be solely provided to the Roads Division and thus support only unincorporated roads, or if any of the revenue would be shared with other cities and towns.

Without additional revenue — the sales tax is projected to bring in $100 million a year — Director Tricia Davis has said the Roads Division will have to eliminate its capital fund by 2028, which could have wide negative effects across the county.

“The big challenge that I’ve heard over and over at these meetings from various board members is, ‘What is the urgency now?’” Board member Clauda Balducci said. “… You can look at a line graph of the funding for Roads and watch it go down, and it is about to hit zero in a year or two, and that means that we will fundamentally not be able to fund any maintenance, any paving, any emergency response, any response to flood damage in the near future.”

“It is a dire situation right now,” Director of Leon Richardson, director of the county’s Local Services, agreed later in the meeting. “… We are spending down our reserves right now. We do not have an emergency fund anymore. Our capital fund is all but gone. If something emergent were to happen, there is literally no way we could respond.”

The Enumclaw, Black Diamond, and South King County contains about 18% of all the miles of roads the Road Division is responsible for, and nearly a quarter of all the bridges.

In total, the Roads Division is charged with maintaining more than 1,500 miles of road across the county, as well as the drainage pipes, guardrails, signs, and more alongside them.

The Roads Division operates with a $129 million budget and a $25 million capital programs budget, bringing its total budget to about $154 million.

Richardson said the Roads Division would not be immediately laying off personnel if new revenue is not found in the near future, but would start a hiring freeze.

SHARING REVENUE?

During the April 4 meeting, two amendments to the potential sales tax increase were introduced.

The first amendment, sponsored by Transportation District Board member Red Dembowski, would have split revenue from the sales tax 50/50 with King County Transit, which manages public transportation all around the county.

According to King County, Transit (also known as Metro) is also facing financial challenges, and at its current pace of revenue and spending is expected to not meet its reserve requirements by 2031 and reach a negative fund balance by 2033.

The amendment failed 6 – 3, with Board members Jorge Baron, Pete Von Reichbauer, and Dombowski supporting, and Board members Reagan Dunn, Teresa Mosqueda, Steffanie Fain, Rhonda Lewis, Sarah Perry, and Balducci opposing.

A second amendment, proposed by Perry, would have 25% of all collected sales tax be distributed to the 29 King County cities based on the city’s proportionate share of total taxable retail shares.

After discussion, Dembowski attempted to change the total percentage cities would collect to 20%; this vote failed 4 – 5, with Baron, Dembowski, Fain, and Balducci supporting; Dunn, Letis, Mosqueda, Perry, and von Reichbaur against the change.

Dunn then attempted to amend the figure to 12.5%.

This again failed 4 – 5, with Dun, Mosqueda, Perry, and Balducci supporting; Baron, Dembowski, Fain, Lewis, and von Reibhbauer opposed the amendment.

The Transportation District deferred the sales tax debate to the April 20 meeting.

Since the Transportation District did not adopt the sales tax by April 17, it missed the deadline to start collecting tax revenue on July 1 of this year.