Op-Ed: Vote for a strong LFP, and also for fairer taxes

By Josh Rosenau

Lake Forest Park is voting on a levy lid lift this November, an extra 22¢/$1,000 to maintain public safety services over the next 6 years. Last year, a very similar measure came 19 votes shy of passing. 

A year's delay brings our city closer to a crisis that could cost us the responsive, community-oriented police department we rely on, the compassionate alternatives to police response we've built with our neighbors, or the safe streets and sheltered parks we value.

Ours isn't the only levy lid lift on ballots in northshore communities this year. Kenmore and Mountlake Terrace are running similar measures, which would allow the city's property taxes to grow faster than would otherwise be possible under an outdated and flawed state law. 

Community members see their property taxes are rising steadily, often without realizing that the money flowing directly to their city — to the streets, police, parks, and community services that drew them to their homes — has been declining as a percentage of those taxes, and shrinking in its buying power.

Property tax rates to King County, school district, fire district, and others have risen because voters approved new taxes (or voted to let certain taxes rise with inflation, as the levy lid lifts all do this year). 

Those taxes are specific to each of those taxing districts. King County's Assessor collects all of those property taxes and distributes them according to the law and the actions of voters.

Lake Forest Park’s slice of that pie has shrunk steadily because voters haven’t adopted a levy lid lift or allowed tax revenue to grow with inflation. 

That means that total property tax collections citywide can’t increase more than 1% per year (except for a a one-time bump when a property is redeveloped). Because inflation is almost always higher than that rate, the city’s buying power declines steadily. 

Since that law was adopted in 2001, LFP’s property tax buying power is down over a million dollars each year. That loss makes it hard to even maintain the same services we had from one budget to the next, let alone keep up with new mandates or add the kinds of services community members request. 

The graph here shows the city’s property tax collections according to data from the King County Assessor, first in the actual dollars collected (also known as “nominal dollars,” shown in blue), and the same number adjusted for inflation (labeled as “buying power” and shown in green). It shows the steady drop in buying power, with a recent crash as the effects of the pandemic, tariffs, and war have accelerated inflation.

The city has two basic ways to close that gap. 

• One: raising taxes. 
• Two: cutting services in increasingly dramatic ways. The proposed tax increase in this case adds about $211 per year in property taxes to the median homeowner (less than Netflix). Closing a gap the size of the current structural deficit would cost the equivalent of the salary for the entire public works team or most of the police force. Selling a park might generate that much revenue, but next year we’d have to sell another.

These seem like dramatic examples, but when Brier’s levy lid lift failed, they cut their police department to the bone. When Edmonds’ levy lid lift failed, they started the process of selling parks, until public outrage forced a different path. Lynnwood just announced 14 layoffs across multiple departments and a property tax hike, all to close this same structural gap. Clyde Hill has already announced that if their levy lid lift fails this November, they will dissolve and be annexed by a neighboring city, losing control of their budget and local zoning.

Prop 1 is the solution Lake Forest Park needs today. But cities alone can't solve the underlying structural problem forcing us to ever more extreme measures. 

We need legislators in Olympia to see the chaos their 1% cap has produced, and implement a comprehensive fix so our property taxes will be fairer, while giving cities the ability to sustain services. 

Rob Foxcurran, the leading candidate to become King County's Assessor, has outlined a package of changes the legislature could pass immediately, so that cities wouldn't have to ask for voter approval just to maintain status quo service, while taking the property tax burden off of renters and working class homeowners. 

The millionaire’s tax passed last year was one step toward a fairer tax code, but the flawed property tax system is increasingly an existential crisis for our cities, and Olympia needs to address it in 2027.

Until the legislature acts, cities are stuck with the bad choices of 2001's lawmakers. We’ll continue to see cities placing existential choices on the ballot all over the state as we do this year. 

Those cities didn’t make bad management choices, they’re just asking voters to help our communities survive a flawed system. Only Olympia can really fix it, and legislators are on the ballot this November, too.

-- Josh Rosenau is a parent, conservation biologist, and policy advocate, and was elected to Lake Forest Park's city council in 2025. This essay expresses his personal views.